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headlight wiring help


z987k

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So I bought a ranger used from a guy at a good price since it needed a few things. Well one of those things is he had the headlight ghetto rigged up and running straight off the battery. Removing the wire from the battery to turn them off.

I figured all I needed to do was hook the lights back up to the original harness, but I find that there is no power to the wires that should go to the lights. (black w/ green stripe and green w/ black stripe) No idea why.

I'm wondering where the best place is to put new wire in and run it to something switched by the switch in the cab. Anyone know where a fuse/ relay that is switched is that I could pull power from?
 


z987k

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I tore into it tonight to see if I couldn't just figure this out myself. I checked the multi-function switch for power, and it puts out power on both high and low beam, so the switch is good. I then went to follow the wires(red w/ yellow and red w/ blue) into the engine bay... and by the time they get there, they have changed colors.

Does anyone have a good wiring diagram of the entire headlight harness? The one on here: http://www.therangerstation.com/tech_library/EDiagrams/files/Diagram_Headlights_1990andlater.JPG
isn't of a lot of use since the colors are wrong. I can't really seem to trace anything without pulling the whole wiring harness out of the car without knowing where the wires change colors and an idea as to where they go.
 

locovaca

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If you're going stock, the wires from the switch power the headlamps directly. You just run those wires all the way to each lamp. Red/Yellow is your low beams, and Red/Blue is your high beams. The original harness would've run them all the way to the headlamp, so it sounds like the guy hacked those up too.

If you're wanting to do it the way it should've been done originally, you would wire up a relay to power the headlamps directly from the battery. You would do two relays, one for the high beam and one for the low beam.
 

z987k

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ok so I'm having a hell of a time here. I can't quite figure out what is going on.
I ended up wiring in some relays so the switch doesn't burn out. That shouldn't matter though.
I found what I am pretty sure are the low beam wire(red w/black) and high beam wire.(gray w/ orange or pinkish) The problem I'm having is whenever the high beam wire has a load, the voltage drops to 0.
The way I have it set up is the gray w/ orange runs to a relay as the signal wire. If the wire is not hooked up to the relay it reads 12v. As soon as I touch it to the relay terminal it drops to 0. But, if the multi-function switch is in the pass position, it reads 12v even under load. This doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would this happen? Is the Multi-function switch bad? How would I test that?
 

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