shouts from the roadside -- headlights

[doublechaz]

I've been having intermittent very dim lowbeam. It picked now to pretty much quit. 20% brightness... I had already swapped the controller under the shin panel with no change. Tonight I pulled over and swapped the relays side for side. Much worse. Swapping back didn't help. I think it's too late to get new ones since the spares I thought I had with me are awol. i think I'm stuck aiming down and running highs to get home.

[doublechaz]

I should have said that banging on the wheel or column used to get them back but doesnt seem to anymore. I suspect stalk switch.

[ehsnils]

The headlights in general have a pretty weird wiring, and it might be the stalk switch.

 

On older subies I have connected relays to feed the headlights and then pull individual 2.5mm2 wires for the filaments in the headlights fed directly from the alternator for minimum voltage loss and maximum light power. A loss of 1V can result in a 20% light loss in the headlight.

[doublechaz]

I've done that relay thing as you describe. Looks like I forgot to mention that I'm running LED conversions. I'm hoping to avoid too much custom wiring, and I do have a spare column switches assembly.

 

Now that the road trip is safely over I'll describe what went down up to now.

 

I was getting ready to aim the lights down, but I decided that the illumination pattern of the highs wouldn't be safe for other drivers no matter how low I went. The lows have a great cut off line so they don't bother others. The highs don't. So out of desperation I put back in my original illumination controller and while I was under there I gave all the connectors next to the column on the right side a squeeze in case I knocked something loose while running my custom instruments harness. That got me through the rest of that night trouble free. I thought I was all set.

 

I slept at dawn and then I drove through the day up to the top of Pike's Peak and then continued on toward home. When dark came again I started having the problem again, only about 450 miles to go, but I didn't want that stress so as soon as I could I got a room and slept and drove the rest of the way home in the daylight.

 

Next plan is to wire up some test leads to things and try to get it to fail while instrumented. I suspect that the stalk switch is going high resistance. If I can see where voltages are building up and/or failing I should know what's broken. I'll get all those connectors apart and clean them and try to tie up my harness so that it isn't pushing on the factory stuff. Then I can move on to swapping the stalk switches or whatever.