lost head light power

[scott0757]

Update July 2008:
Well it appears that when I run in high beam, I got one bright filament. When I run on low beam I get a bleed off to the high beam lamp, drawing power from the low beam element and making it dimmer than it's supposed to be.

When I run the High/low by manually jumping the headlamp wires so that only one element is connected at a time, the low is almost as bright as the high beam, but when I hook the headlamp to the connector, back to weak/dual filament operation.

As noted before, the faint glow of the high/beam indicator lamp during low beam operations indicated a problem. I began to suspect the RLU unit, so following the threads on this site and removed it and added the jumper to the Harness. Still no better.

Disassembled the lamp switch and checked all connections/joints all look good. Put some dielectric grease in and reassembled... Still no improvement on low beam.

I also opened, cleaned and greased all the wired connectors in this circuit with no improvement.

Any Ideas where I should focus for a ground/short between the hi/low circuits? My ideas are about as dim as the low beam about now. Thanks.

[scott0757]

Well, solved the mystery. After removing the RLU and making the required jumpers, I still had a very weak low beam with a low power feed to the high beam filament and the high beam indicator lamp. The cause? I had the 3 lead wires connected to the wrong terminals on the headlamp bulb itself!!! I notice in the molded headlamp connector body the printer words "High", "Low" and "GND" so I made sure that the high was the yellow lead, the low was the green and the black was the GND and all is better!

I guess I need to think simpler from now on...