I’m having an issue with my headlights on an 83 firebird. My passenger motor was dead so I got a replacement from another firebird but I’m not sure on the year it came from. What I do know is that it will put the headlight down but seems to be stuck on closing. When you try to use the manual dial to raise it back it the motor fights you. If I disconnect the wires going to the relay the manual dial turns as normal again. At first I thought it was the relay but now I’m thinking it’s mis wired and I don’t want to just start guessing and couldn’t find anything on this motor for color code for the wires. I’ll attach pictures of the original motor and the wires spliced onto the new motor. Any help would be great if anyone has any ideas.

Original motor and wires

New motor and old ends spliced on

 

Hi Scrub, welcome to TGO

I'm sorry I don't know much about the early headlight motor system, but if it helps you in any way I do have this 83 wiring diagram I can share with ya......

 

You should check out Rodney dickmans website he sells kits to re wire these earlier cars. There's a lot of good info on these. The early fires are similar. Between this info and the schematic you should be pretty good. My 82 has had intermittent headlight issues and it's always resolved w the checking connectors. There are also rebuild kits for the relays/isolation relay and motors.

 

Thanks for the info all. Still having the same issue. If i swap any of the wires around I just end up blowing a fuse so I believe it was wired correct the first time but the issue may be at the links or with the relay. I ordered a new relay and will be trying that and checking all the fusable links when I go to replace it.

 

Hi Scrub, , , me again.....

I had a thought here. When the headlight door was closed, and you tried to use the manual **** to open it (and it fought to return/remain in the closed position), what position was the headlight switch in, on or off?

If the headlight switch was off, once you rotated the **** in the opening direction even the slightest bit, the limit switches in the motor would have began indicating to the relay that the door was open, and with the switch off, yeah it would have been trying to follow that command; Headlight switch off = close the door.

If you did have the headlight switch off, try turning it on, and then try manually raising the door. If this works, my belief would be either that door's relay has a bad contact in the opening circuit, or perhaps a bad limit switch in the motor is keeping it from opening normally.

Have you tried swapping the two relays, and see if the problem changes sides?

 

So when the lights are turned off the they go down and the manual **** has resistance but its the same if I turn the lights on they will not go up and still have resistance. I actually have the new relay on my now and when I get a little bit of time I will be swapping it out to see if that fixes the issue at all. I do not have the isolation relay though so that would probably be my next step. I wouldnt think the isolation relay is bad since the driver side works as it should but i could be wrong on that.

Thanks for the input. Ill update once I change out relay.

 

So in the end I did wire it correct. The relay was bad. Once I installed the new one both lights go up and down as normal. Still dont like that the same part number motors have different color code to them but it works so im happy.

Thanks for the help