The unsolvable headlight problem

[alg]

This is month 5 on this problem and a small army of people have been unable to resolve.

Had no headlights on the 73 Thing when purchased from the original owner.
All other lights (turn, brake, emerg) worked fine.

Replaced light relay, headlight switch, turn-signal switch and bulbs.

This solved all problems, except for the hibeams.

I am on my third headlight relay now, and even the 2 Vw repair shops cannot find the problem.

lo-beams work fine, but when you switch to hibeams the headlights go off.
As another mentioned before in this forum (cannot find after a plethora of searches) if you hold the signal lever, the hibeams stay on.

It seems that I just cannot get a good relay.
When I hold the signal lever, there is power from the relay onto the wire to the highbeams. When I let go of the lever, the power goes away.

Its like the relay will not hold in the hibeam position for some reason.
If the problem is not the signal lever and the relay works, then something else must be wrong. right?

Don't know what else to do here.
Without hibeams I cannot get the car inspected, and I have not been able to drive it since last November as my current inspection is expired.
Two repair shops stated they cannot find the problem and they want to 'rewire' the headlights - which I will not allow.

Got one relay from germanmotorworks, one from the thing shop and one from jbugs. Two of them are Bosch and the other is unlabeled.

I know electronics and can read the wiring diagrams (now that I have lived in the friggin' dash for the last 5 months), but this has me baffled.

Any suggestion is required at this point. The f-ing highbeams have rendered my perfect Museum piece a useless brick of crap.

[Woreign]

I had the very same problem! The new relay I bought would not switch properly. I opened up the relay and noticed that the plastic switch tab was too long to toggle between positions. I trimed the tab and it works fine now. When you take the cover off of the relay you'll see what I'm talking about...

[Ferretkona]

I had this problem before. The headlights were wired wrong, the ground wire was swapped with the low beam. Worked great on low beams but two hots with no ground produced nada.

Make sure your headlights work, even new ones can be bad.

Probably the relay, just giving you possibles.

[nwflvw]

Sounds to me like swapped wires on the relay. Relays rarely fail. You should be able to test the relay with a battery, 2 wires and multimeter.
Some of the replacement relays have 5 prongs instead of the 4 that the original relay had. If you have one with 5 prongs you will have to install a jumper wire.
You can test everything else by hooking the white wire with the black stripe (hot when the key is on) to first the yellow wire and then to the white wire. That will test both of the headlights, fuses, etc.
Does the relay click when you pull the directional switch? My guess is the relay is not changing back and forth. Vince

[Woreign]

Here's my original post and what terminals to jump if you have the 5-terminal relay:

http://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewtopic.php?t=178854&highlight=relay

Good Luck

[alg]

Thanks to all for the assistance.
I'll 'investigate' the relays, and stop assuming that the wiring is perfectly stock and see if there are some incorrect grounds.

[uberautowerks]

Check your headlight ground connections under the hood too. I've had a similar problem on several cars and traced it back to either a dirty or painted ground and or a mis-wired headlight connector.
_________________
--- The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.
- Douglas Adams -
---
'74 Thing (White)
'71 Single cab (White too)
'70 Weekender (White three)
'05 Evolution VIII (White also!!!)
'68 F-250 (White over black)

[alg]

Took apart two of the new relays. They are built like crap. (and in Brazil)

The tip about the plastic tab in the relay was spot on for the two of them.
They never worked when shipped from the manufacturer.

But once I remedied this, it was hard to get one working 100% of the time.

I opened up the original 34-year-old relay which was made in Germany and had the VW logo on it. Hit it with some contact cleaner in the right place, and viola, I have headlights again.

3 bad relays was the problem.
Should have just 'gone original German' from the get go.

alg

[Woreign]

Now get your Thing registered and back on the road!

Glad to hear you got your problem fixed...