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Headlights going out randomly

Oxyacetylene

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Stoneville, NC
My headlights will go out while I am driving. As you can imagine, a bit of an annoyance! When this happens the running lights are still on, brake lights still work. If I flip the light switch lever off and on, I can hear the relay in the fuse/breaker panel clicking. After a bid of fiddling with the switch, or on their own, they come back on. Thinking it might be a ground wire, I looked and found a ground tied to the frame near the driver's side headlight right behind the top of the bumper. On this ground location I removed paint down to bare metal and put it back...didn't help. If I run the low beams it doesn't seem to be as bad. Perhaps the relay is bad?
 

oboyjohn

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Quebec , Canada
Does your truck have a standard SMP 3 arm headlight switch? I had a very similar problem years ago in a Canadian truck. There was an intermittant short in the switch. With the lights on, the circuit would warm up to the point where it would find the easiest path to ground. This would often happen at the worst possible time: at night coming to a crest in the road and not knowing what was on the other side. Once in the training sector at Base Gagetown in New Brunswick, this situation happened as described above. I had to shut off the lights and turn them back on a few times before thay finally came back on. When they did, i had the surprise of my life, a bull moose was in the middle of the road! He froze in the headlights so I had to stop very quickly. He didn't move so I had to stick my C7 ( Canadian version of your M-16) out the drivers window and let go a few rounds. That woke him up and he went along his merry way. I got back to camp and noticed the switch was warm when I shut down. I replaced the switch the next day and it never happened again.
 

NDT

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Camp Wood/LC, TX
My guess is the relay in the PDP is not making good contact in it's plug in location.
 

Oxyacetylene

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Steel Soldiers Supporter
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Location
Stoneville, NC
Both good suggestions on something to try. I can hear the relay clicking, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have a contact issue or just be bad. oboyjohn - mine does have the 3 arm switch. I'll have to look at the breaker panel label when I get a chance and see if there is actually a relay for the lights, or if they are just fed off the switch with a resettable breaker in the panel for safety.
 

1951M1078

Well-known member
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Glendale,AZ
With my 911 you need to care spare relay's. I was think that "when I get mine" ? I will care some spares. The dash on the M1078 looks like it's loaded with them .
 

Oxyacetylene

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Location
Stoneville, NC
I drove the truck today and after I got home I checked the breaker panel. There is a separate relay for high beams and low beams, so that would not seem to be the issue. There is however a 15 amp circuit breaker that feeds the headlights, number CB78, and it is auto-reset. After driving the truck for a while that circuit breaker was hot to the touch. CB70 is 20 amp and feeds the light switch. Maybe it is just a bad connection in the breaker panel with that breaker or something. It will probably be at least a week before I get to do much troubleshooting on it.
 
Last edited:

Oxyacetylene

Active member
Steel Soldiers Supporter
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Location
Stoneville, NC
I did a bit of troubleshooting this weekend. I checked with my multimeter the amperage the lights were drawing on low beam and high beam and then compared this to two other FMTV's. On low beam it was drawing over 7 amps and high beam was about 10.5 amps. I replaced the 3 arm switch with a spare one that I had, although I don't think that was the issue. In the breaker panel there are two different relays, labeled high beam and low beam. Interestingly, they work together and removing either of them means you have neither high nor low beam lights. One of the relays had been replaced with a 24V relay, which I'm not sure the voltage matters too much, but I went ahead and swapped it for the B.O. Drive relay since I don't really use the B.O. lights. With the lights on the relays would get pretty warm. Looking closely at the sockets they plug into, I noticed that one of the contacts from each of the two sockets looked like it was bent open too far, and the plastic piece next to them were discolored (presumably from high heat due to bad connections). I used a small pick to pry the contacts out a little so they would make better contact. The picture shows them before I bent them out some. Notice the brown plastic beside them, when the others are yellow. I also replaced the breaker for the headlights with a standard blade fuse for now, in case that breaker was not making a good connection internally.
2015-05-23 16.49.19.jpg

On a related note, normal blade fuses fit just fine in case you are missing some breakers. The 12V relays used look to me like standard automotive type, but I haven't confirmed that yet. If you look at the label on the breaker panel cover, notice how the relay schematics show the contacts numbered as 87 and 87A, which sounds very familiar to standard automotive relays. This might be helpful when replacements are needed.
 
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