Headlights wont go up or turn on Help! 1981 928
 

Hi! New owner of an 81 928, i dont know these cars so before fiddling with anything related to the headlights which were working fine a day ago but just stopped going up or down and turning on. Thanks for the help!

The first thing I'd try is manually raising the headlights. there is a rubber cover over the headlight lift motor. if you remove this cover there is a knob on the top that you can turn to manually raise the headlights. It will take quite a bit of turning to get them into the full up position. Once they are fully raised, turn the lights on and then turn on the ignition. The relay senses the headlight position to only switch the lights on once they are raised. Hopefully they will come on at this point. If they do try cycling them off and on a few times. with any luck the motor just lost temporary contact with one of the traces and manually moving them will get the system working again. Let us what happens and we can go from there.

Also a word of CAUTION, inspect the lift arm and make absolute certain there is a cer clip at the end of the pivot rod. If not the arm will most likely slide off and cause catastrophic radiator damage. It would be wise to look up "the" replacement upgrade or at the very least replace with a new original! Cheap insurance for a very expensive fix.

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I tried and it doesnt seem to work!

What part doesn't work? when you turn the manual knob on the top of the motor, do the headlights raise?

Yes they do with the manual knob, but there seems to be no power in the motor to rise the lights up and turn them on... I'm currently working on taking the motor out and struggling with the bracket attaching the motor itself to the metal brackets

Reply
 

The motor doesnt seem to come on when i turn the headlight switch on, the lights won't come on either... Tried cleaning the wires to the motor and it still doesn't do anything..

You are not turning the Manual Knob it seems. Read his post on that. You need to move the lights Manually, not with the motor power.