I still need to take care of a bunch of details, but the basics are working!
Month: February 2022
Mounting the headlight door motors
Headlight door motors
From what i can tell, this car was originally a base model (manual transmission) car. The RS pieces are OEM, probably from a wrecked car. The headlight doors did swing on their brackets, but none of the mechanism or wiring to open and close them were on the car when we got it.
The original 67 setup had electric motors and a bunch of relays and switches. The 68-69 setup Used vacuum actuators. Getting the original stuff was going to be difficult and expensive, so I decided to go with something simpler.
After doing some research, I found that other people had used early 90’s Firebird headlight system components successfully. I hit eBay and got a set of left and right replacement motors, a controller module, and a wiring harness.
1990-2002 Pontiac Firebird
– Headlight controller
– Headlight wiring harness
– Headlight motors
After stripping the unnecessary wiring out of the harness, I was left with 4 connectors and some wire.
It looks complicated, but it’s really fairly simple:
The controller has two connectors on it.
One connector has four wires, those go to two 2-wire connectors for left and right motor power.
the other connector has five wires on it, the two black ones go to ground, the two orange ones go to +12v (this should go through a 10a fuse), and the yellow one is a signal wire that should be connected to the low beam power wire of one of the headlights.
The nice thing about this setup is there’s nothing to adjust. The controller powers the motor, the motor turns until it hits something, the controller senses the current draw go up because the motor isn’t able to turn, and the controller cuts power. Connect the signal wire to +12 and the controller runs the motors one direction, cut the power to the signal wire and it runs them in the other direction.
for the first test I put an arm on the motor shaft and a bolt for the arm to run into (click picture to see video):