{"id":881,"date":"2022-02-10T22:53:13","date_gmt":"2022-02-11T03:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/?p=881"},"modified":"2025-05-23T15:25:23","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T19:25:23","slug":"headlight-door-motors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2022\/02\/10\/headlight-door-motors\/","title":{"rendered":"Headlight door motors"},"content":{"rendered":"

From what i can tell, this car was originally a base model (manual transmission) car. \u00a0The RS pieces are OEM, probably from a wrecked car. \u00a0The 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.<\/p>\n

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The original 67 setup had electric motors and a bunch of relays and switches. \u00a0The 68-69 setup \u00a0Used vacuum actuators. \u00a0Getting the original stuff was going to be difficult and expensive, so I decided to go with something simpler.<\/p>\n

After doing some research, I found that other people had used early 90\u2019s Firebird headlight system components successfully. \u00a0I hit eBay and got a set of left and right replacement motors, a controller module, and a wiring harness.<\/p>\n

1990-2002 Pontiac Firebird
\n– Headlight controller
\n– Headlight wiring harness
\n– Headlight motors<\/p>\n

After stripping the unnecessary wiring out of the harness, I was left with 4 connectors and some wire.<\/p>\n

It looks complicated, but it\u2019s really fairly simple:<\/p>\n

The controller has two connectors on it.<\/span><\/p>\n

One connector has four wires, those go to two 2-wire connectors for left and right motor power.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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The nice thing about this setup is there\u2019s nothing to adjust. \u00a0The controller powers the motor, the motor turns until it hits something, the controller senses the current draw go up because the motor isn\u2019t able to turn, and the controller cuts power. \u00a0Connect 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.<\/p>\n

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):<\/p>\n

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From what i can tell, this car was originally a base model (manual transmission) car. \u00a0The RS pieces are OEM, probably from a wrecked car. \u00a0The 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-camaro","category-headlight-doors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":899,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881\/revisions\/899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bracketracer.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}