Re: High Beam Headlamps

[southern@ox.cgd.ucar.EDU (Lawrence Buja)]

Pat Johnson writes...
{I'm new to the list, but have been reading the posts for awhile. =
{My first problem is the headlamps. Low beam works fine. When I go to High=
{ Beam I lose both lights on the drivers side. Can this mean one lamp is b=
{urned out or do I need to look for an electrical problem?

Appended below is an old post of mine where I fixed my highbeams and more

{Also, does anyone know where I can get an owners manual for this car? Do =
{you know of a good repair manual? Haynes doesn't help much:(

Yup, get the official Jaguar XJ6 manual: "Series III Service Manual"
Published by Jaguar Cars Limited, Publication Part NO AKM-9006 ED 5.
Special Interest Car Parts (SICP) or Welches should have it.  Actually,
I've found the Haynes manual's to be very good.

Does anyone know the part numbers of those detailed factory repair
suppliments for the SIII XJ6 which the mechanics have?

Also, find a copy of Hemmings Motor News at your magazine shop.  It's a
thick US-wide classified ad magazine with an ugly yellow cover and a big
section on Jaguars.  Most of the big US parts places advertise there.
Order a catalog from SICP, Welches and anyone else who looks
interesting.  Hemmings is a nice resource to have around in case you
need to find used parts in the future.  And you can spend hours looking
at all the cool cars up for sale.

Have fun...

/\      Lawrence Buja           http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cms/southern
  \_][  southern@ncar.ucar.edu  National Center for Atmospheric Research
      \_________________________Boulder,_Colorado___80307-3000__________

-Subject: XJ6 foglight mods
-To: jag-lovers@psy.uwa.edu.au (Jaguar Mailing list)
-Date: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 06:58:08 -0600 (MDT)

I've just completed my first Present Owner wiring bodge on my '81 XJ-6.
I'm sure that it violates some motor vehicle equipment statute or
another, but I'll leave it be until the local constabulary decides to
have a chat with me about it.

Around here, we don't get much fog, but we do have many deer.  A
colleague who ran into one on her bike one night said "When you collide
with one, it's just like hitting a sandbags on stilts.  And they're just
about as smart as a sandbag too."  Their usual strategy is to feed
quietly by the side of the road and then leap out in your path when they
think you are not looking or if they suspect that you are overdriving
your headlights.

After experiencing a near miss coming down the mesa a dark night a few
months ago, I resolved to increase the amount of light that I was
putting on the road.  The first step was to get all my high beams
working.  One of the outboard 7" headlamps would only come on as a
lowbeam.  I traced the problem to a bad bullet connector in the high
beam wiring (blue/white wire).  I cleaned up the fuses in the engine
compartment and sanded all the bullet connectors going to the
headlights.  This fixed the problem and resulted in a minor improvement
in the light volume.

The next step was to replaced the broken original foglights with a set
of halogens.  This was a huge improvement since the foglights are
extremely bright and can be aimed to illuminate the sides of the road
where the deer hide.  Now a deer would have really sprint to get out in
front of me.  I had heard of an old road rally trick of increasing the
"reach" of your auxiliary lights by crossing them across each other.  So
I aimed the right light so that it illuminated the left side of the road
and the left light the right.  It does work, but it also looks so goofy
during the daytime that I reaimed them in a conventional manner.  But
soon, I tired of having to find the rotary switch to turn off the
foglights, then pull the stalk to dim the highbeams every time a car
came the other way.

So, the final step was to wire the foglights into the highbeam circuit
so that when the highbeams are on, the foglights are on and when the
highbeams are off, the foglights are off.  Naturally, the first method I
used was the hardest.  The foglight wire is a yellow/red wire which
comes out thru the firewall, runs under the 5 fuse box on the side of
the engine bay (but it isn't fused and doesn't go thru the headlight
relay) and continues up forward to the foglights.  It has a bullet
connector under the fuse box.  I disconnected this connection and
nondistructively spliced the side running up to the foglights into the
output side of one of the 35 Amp highbeam fuses in the 5 fuse box.  This
worked fine but was rather inelegant.  I liked the fact that the
foglights are now relayed and fused, but didn't like the fact that both
foglights were running off one fuse, which was already supplying 2
highbeams.

Then I remembered that the junction for the offside highbeam bullet
connectors (located up in front of the radiator) are double junctions
with 4 ports available and only 3 of which are in use (1 input, 1 output
to the outer highbeam, 1 output to the inner highbeam).  So I cleaned up
the unused port on that side and connected the nearby foglight bullet
connector into each.  This works fine too and now the foglight load is
shared by the twin 35A headlight fuses.

I really like this setup.  With my brights on, I get an immense amount
of light being projected and a click of the highbeam/lowbeam stalk
reduces this to a very polite lowbeam level.  The change is so dramatic
that now I really feel unsafe running with the lowbeams at any speed
above a crawl.

I suppose the final step is to really do it right and connect the (now
unused) rotary foglight switch, the foglight power wire and the lowbeam
power wire thru a relay so that the foglights are primarly switched
on/off with the rotary foglight control and, if they are on, have them
automatically switched off when the lowbeams are selected with the
highbeam/lowbeam stalk switch.

/\      Lawrence Buja           Climate and Global Dynamics Division
  \_][  southern@ncar.ucar.edu  National Center for Atmospheric Research
      \_________________________Boulder,_Colorado___80307-3000__________

---

References:

• High Beam Headlamps
• From: Jerry and Pat Johnson <rascal@gulf.net>

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