Well I finally fixed the high beam dimmer!
The symptoms told me the relay was not closing so it had to be the foot switch, the relay or the two interconnect wires. I started at the foot switch since that was the easiest thing to locate. The switch was good so it became a game of find the relay....They were nice enough to dip the wires to the relay down below a piece of sheet metal which threw me off for a bit, but at least the relay was close by and easy to get at. The wiring was fine, but the relay was not....
The coil was open on the relay. Well I hit up the local Autozone and they did not have it or any part number for it, or even the motivation to try to find a 20A DPST relay that I could kludge in. Next I checked Radio Snack but they were out of automotive grade relays...After not finding anything on the net, or any 12V relays in my parts stash I came up with two options...Fix the open coil or kludge in a 6V DP-tripple throw relay (with the contacts in parallel to match the current rating) with a resistor in series with the coil to drop half the input voltage. The repair seems to have worked.
The open was in the lead in wire to the coil (corrosion), but was near the center of the winding which forced me to drill out the rivet for the center terminal which also happens to be the core for the coil...After I got the core out unwinding the coil took me about an hour. Rewinding it proved to be quick though. I chucked the core into a drill plugged into a variac to reduce the speed to a safe and manageable one. A bunch of soldering (including replacing the crimp end of the rivet with solder) later and I obtained a working product.
One of the connectors to the relay is a bit finicky, but once in the right place seems okay.
I love that it cost me no money, but it cost enough time that I sort of wish I'd have been able to buy a replacement...I had been planing to swap in a stereo 8-track (until I can get a good quad 8-track) today (well technically yesterday now that it's 2:00AM
) but will have to get to that later.
Hope I didn't bore ya too badly.
