My passenger side headlight hasn't been able to pop up for a while now, so I decided to take a crack at fixing it. I ordered the rebuild kit for my car, only to discover that 1) I didn't need to replace the gears and 2) The replacement gear has diagonal teeth, where the original gear is straight cut. That's on me for not checking first, but I took the opportunity to at least refresh the grease inside and put it back together.

​​​​​I used a volt meter to check the harness leads, and it was getting power to turn off, but no signal was coming when the headlights were turned on. So I'm probably looking at either the actuator relay, fusible links or the isolation relay. I should have just started there, but hindsight is 20/20.

The real problem I'm having is that the headlight motor isn't disengaging when the headlights are turned off. It gets hot and I can hear a little "tink" noise intermittently and the **** will twitch. If I push down on the ****, I can hear the actuator switch turn off, but it won't stay off. I tested the driver side and I can't even push it down because it's all the way disengaged. I took the motor apart again and looked it over, but I couldn't find a reason why. The only thing I saw wrong was the soldering on part of the actuator switch was partially failing, but I don't know if it was because of the motor getting hot. The motor was working properly before I opened it up, and I don't recall seeing the solder splitting. Not to say I couldn't have missed it, but I didn't have this problem before so it seems unlikely. But as things stand, I can't hook the headlight back up because it's going to cause damage to the motor, drain the battery overnight, or both.

​​​​​​Does anyone know much about the 3 wire headlight motors and have some ideas about why the motor won't disengage fully when the headlights are turned off? I'm kind of stumped here at this point.

 

From the description of the problem that arose after taking it apart and reassembling it, it sounds as if the motor is not actuating the limit switch that is supposed to be actuated when the motor (and headlight door) have reached the end of it's travel. I will use the term "clocking" the motor to ensure the switch gets hit when the door closes is what you need to do to stop the motor from keeping trying to close the door when it's already at the end of it's travel.

 

I thought along those lines, like something was preventing it from getting enough movement to trigger the switch. I took it apart again and proceeded to clean up the contact points. When I was putting it back together, I discovered the problem. The grommet that was beneath the **** was moved out of place. Because it's under the ****, it was difficult to see and very easy to get out of place. I had to use a small screwdriver to nudge it into place, and the travel to the off switch was much smoother and had less resistance. I reconnected the harness and the motor retracted and fully disengaged, so everything is working again.

There's not a lot of write ups about the first generation of headlight motors, so I included a picture of the grommet that was out of place and was keeping the switch from being activated. This way maybe someone can benefit from my experience and avoid the same problem. You can see from where it's located, it's easy to miss unless you have good light. Once I had it back in place, everything moved with much less resistance.

And for a happy ending, the actuator relay was the issue. I ordered a new one from NAPA yesterday and they had it waiting for me by this afternoon. It's nice to have both moving headlights again, no more having to pop the hood and manually crank one open every time I have to drive after dark.

 

Nice, it's great when the solution ends up being so simple