Backroads_Hunter

I've used this forum a lot of technical stuff but I know of no information on this so I thought I would contribute a writeup on a fix. I'm sorry there are no pictures but I didn't have a camera at the time. My friend a mechanical engineer and electrician suggested this after having a look at the usual suspects for a flip up problem on an fd3s.

How to (possibly) fix your headlight retractor motor – on the FD3S RX7. The procedure is probably similar in other cars with flip up lights.

Note: this will only work if your problem is similar to mine. The power supply and ground on my car are healthy – as are the relays that control the lights, switches, etc.

- You'll need some metric sockets, a phillips screwdriver, a multimeter (and some phone wire or something), fine sandpaper, fine steel wool and probably 2 sets of tweezers.

My car has the unique problem of the left headlight motor occasionally lagging behind the other light when prompted to open or close. ( The right one would change position immediately and the left one would either open or close in unison or close a few seconds/minutes later). The problem got more obvious with time. Eventually I found the left side motor was very slow to respond to being raised or lowered unless I lightly turned the manual motor – this would make the motor start working again. This suggests a problem with the retractor as opposed to the rest of the car.

1) First and foremost – make sure all your switches that control the retractor motors are not at fault. Make sure the connector to the motor is getting power and you have good continuity to ground (or battery negative). Section E in the “body electric” part of the factory service manual that has a circuit diagram of the lights and the relays that control the headlight motors. Basically – you have 2 hot lines in the motor harness connector and one ground – hot 1 is for raising the lights, hot 2 is for lowering them. You can test this by stripping some phone wire and putting it in the connector. Note that the same switch and relays control both lights but the grounds are different ( you'll probably have to take the bumper off to get at them).

2) Assuming there is nothing wrong with the harness on the car, you can start looking at the motor. I found that, on the left side anyway, I had to take out the whole headlight assembly and I had to remove the battery.
take off the headlight cover and the little bezel/frame thing that wraps around the front of it.
Pop off the little ball-joint on the end of the arm that supports the headlight bucket – this is easily accomplished with a flat head screwdriver - the headlight bucket should move up and down freely without the motor now. (Note that there is a manual crank on the headlight motor so you can raise and lower it without power and and you will have to do this to pop off the balljoint).
Remove the little subframe/bracket thing the headlight assembly sits in. The headlight motor has a couple bolts that have be loosened or removed. (I found I could pivot the motor out of the car without removing the arm on the motor that lifts the bucket if I loosened the right bolt).

3) The headlight retractor is made out of two pieces, which mazda was nice enough to make rebuildable. The top part – atop which sits the manual crank – is the electric motor proper. Inside is a copper plated rotor and two tiny carbon brushes on springs.

-Remove the two screws on the cover and take the motor apart very, very carefully or it will blow apart like a watch – ask me how I know. In the event it blows apart on you, you can put the put the brushes back in place with tweezers (ideally 2 tweezers).
- Inspect the brushes for wear – if worn, you might be able to find some brushes at your local power tool repair shop and “machine” them to fit with some sandpaper.
- check the rotor for burnt spots – if you have lousy contact in any one spot, this would explain the motor's reluctance to spin. If the motor is a bit burnt, you can put the whole rotor in a the chuck of a drill run it on slow and clean the copper with some sandpaper as the drill is running.
- Once satisfied, put the motor back together (carefully).

4) The second part of the retractor assembly is a limit switch. Inside, you'll see a disc with three contacts raking against it (which sort of look like harmonica reeds) – the centre one is common, the other two are for up or down, respectively. The disc has 2 notches - a notch on the inside and a notch on the outside to break continuity between the contacts. Essentially, if the motor just went up it will go down the next time is it asked to work because the “up” contact is sitting on the gap in the disc and cant for a circuit (and vice versa).
- Remove the cover on the limit switch
-Take off the contacts and clean them until they shine; take some steel wool and shine up the disc too. I would bend the contacts towards the disc very gently too to help with better continuity (less arcing).
- Put the limit switch cover back on.

5) Temporary re-connect the battery and plug the retractor motor back into its harness connector. Hit the headlight up/down button or turn the stalk headlight switch off and on a few times and verify your motor works on command (you should should see the little arm move).
6) Put the whole headlight and assembly back together. Try it again. (Note that the assembly can shift slightly from its original position).
7) You're done – now you just have to f^%# with the headlight covers until it looks ok.

96fd3s

Good post!
I changed the brushes on one of my headlight motors about 6 months ago.
I also changed the brushes on my starter motor when I had the "click click" no turn over problem.
Changing brushes seems to be a forgotten thing around here. Most people opt to throw more power at it, or get a whole new one!
good job

Mugen1800

You literally saved me 200$. Thank you! hello other mods....or gas...or food. I work with these things here and there and i never even bothered to fix them.

KFC3S

Apologies for the 2 and a bit year bump. I found this thread tonight and was able to repair my passenger (RHD Car) headlight thanks to the info in the OP. Since there wasn't any pics, I thought I'd take some to further assist anyone else that might find them useful.

I had the same situation as the OP, headlights slowly getting out of sync until eventually one side only went up but wouldn't go down. Because of this I determined the limit switch was the likely culprit.

These are the two screws you need to remove. Make sure to use the correct head screwdriver, they are quite soft.



Carefully pry the top cover off, it's a little stiff. Now you can see the three contacts for ground/up/down. Mine were covered in dilectric grease and were filthy.



Here you can see the three tracks, also covered in grease and grit. There is a worm-drive coming out of the headlight motor which turns the tracks and the fingers remain stationary. To me it appears the grease is to lubricate this mechanism rather than the fingers/tracks, but I could be wrong.



Here's the tracks after giving them a clean with contact cleaner, a wipe down and a sand to rough them up a bit.



I don't have a photo of the cleaned fingers, but essentially I just wiped them down, gave the contacts a sand to shine them up, and bent them outwards very slightly to improve contact pressure.

Reassemble the unit and plug it in to give it a test.

My car is a 96 jdm series 7, but everything in the OP's description matched up so it's likely to be the same for series 6/7/8.

Sgtblue

iTrader: (16)

This is on my winter list of things to do while the car is idle. Thanks to the OP and to KFC3S for the pictures. My left side has been getting worse and this gives me a place to start.