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Thank you To Railshot for this excellent article about rebuilding 2nd Generation Pontiac Fiero headlight motors. To help decide if you need to rebuild your headlight motors visit here: http://fierodomain.com/content/view/217/129/
First off I would like to thank Rodney Dickman (a fellow Wisconsinite) for making the rebuild kits available, and having excellent, easy to understand, directions. 1. Raise the headlight you are going to rebuild and disconnect the power to the light, and the motor (large red arrows). These are plugs that are held in place with a small plastic lock. Lift up on the locking mechanism and pull apart. As you can see from the picture I was unable to raise mine because it was totally broken.
2. Remove the two upper mounting nuts (bluish arrows) from the top of the headlight assembly. Once these have been removed, loosen the lower two mounting nuts approximately 5 full turns. This will allow you to remove the complete headlight assembly.
3. Place the headlight assembly on a workbench or other suitable surface for disassembly.
4. With the lever actuators facing up, remove the nut that connects the connecting rod from the motor. This can be a tight fitting nut so use an open-end wrench on the metal actuator rod to keep the lifting mechanism from moving.
5. Turn the headlight unit over and remove the 3 screws (bluish arrows) from the gear mechanism cover.
6. Remove the cover and behold the problem. If it was like mine, it will have a fine powder inside of the gear housing. This used to be cylindrical pieces of plastic that transferred power from the motor / gear to the headlight lifting arms.
7. At this point you will need to remove the gear from the housing. On top of the brass bushing you will see some spacer washers. Keep track of these washers and how many were on top. You will need to replace them when you reassemble the housing. The bottom of the bushing will also have some spacer washers. Do not lose count and mix them up with the top ones. Prior to pulling out the bushing and shaft it is recommended to remove any burrs from the shaft as this slides through another bushing in the housing and the burrs will cause some damage to the bushing, reducing the life of the bushing. This is what mine looked like once the drive shaft was out. Much ground up plastic.
8. Remove the gear and clean, clean, clean. A shop vac or compressed air will remove all of the old plastic.
9. This is the gear that I removed from mine and almost forgot to check for ground up plastic. Look in every nook and cranny for this stuff, cause it will be everywhere.
10. Once everything is cleaned up,
You will begin to reassemble the unit with the new parts.
This is what they look like.
The new ones are in the bag and the ones on the right are what were left of my passenger side mechanism. The driver’s side was totally gone and ground up to powder. I recommend doing both sides as when 1 is bad the other is not too far behind.
11. To reassemble, I pre-assembled the spacer washers, gear, and shaft outside of the housing. This simplified aligning the new Delrin bushings. They fit in the 3, ½ round pockets on the gear, and the shaft assembly has 3, ½ round pockets also. They need to be aligned with each other and then placed as an assembly into the housing. This is what it looks like reassembled without the cover (or all the garbage).
12. The rest is just putting everything back together in the opposite order that you took it apart, and testing. Mine worked like new… Good luck and have fun. :roll: It took me about 45 minutes for each headlight and I work very slow. LOL
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. |
Written by Davs87 on 2008-07-24 21:11:29
Thanks for posting this article! I rebuilt both of the headlights on my 87 and now they work great. btw, the pictures were helpful  |
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