Headlight Pod Vibration When Up

[fmxa]

When driving at night I notice my headlights vibrating with the road surface, which I'm guessing is due to the pod lift mechanism having play in the linkage and not fully locking the pod in the up position. Anyone one know how to adjust this?

Cheers,

Paul

[Paul C]

When driving at night I notice my headlights vibrating with the road surface, which I'm guessing is due to the pod lift mechanism having play in the linkage and not fully locking the pod in the up position. Anyone one know how to adjust this?

Cheers,

Paul

Hi Paul,

Mine do this, i can see excessive wear on the pivot and i can also see the tiny plate i need

to replace to correct this. Unfortunately the car is a toy and rarely see's the night, so whenever

i have the time to do this job, it's sunny, and i go out for a spin instead!!!

The possibility of me ever mending this is low. It does however look pretty simple,

not sure if yours had the same pop riveted plate as mine though?

[mayevora]

I had this really bad when I purchased the car six years ago and was one of the first jobs SJ did for me. Never been purfect though - still notice the slight 'bounce' effect, not nesessarily on the backs of other cars but more on reflective roadsigns.

I've asked drivers that I have followed if it looks annoying, or like i'm flashing lights at them. The're answer is usially that they don't even notice it.

[tjs98jetta]

I had this problem with the driver's side headlamp pod on mine. The captured bolt had come loose from the back (inaccessible side) of the riveted support bracket and there was a lot of wear at the point where the bolt went through the glass fiber pod itself. Plus the bolt and washers were all rusted up. I ended up cutting the bolt with a thin hacksaw blade to release the pod and fabricating a new pivot bolt using a short length of the appropriate metric size stainless steel threaded rod and a pressed on washer to form a solid support that could be epoxied into the pivot bearing in the support bracket. I also cut a small piece of 1/8 inch aluminium sheet to size and drilled it through to repair the pod itself. This was also epoxied in place. After reassembling it all, it works fine and looks completely original. This avoided having to drill out the rivets of the support bracket. It was a time consuming and fiddly job though.

[fmxa]

Thanks for the replies guys - think I'm going to leave it alone as it seldom sees night time, and I don't think the effort involved is worth it!

[Rob]

I replaced the little ball joint push rod things on mine, cheap to do and mucho improved.

[Tentenths]

Got exactly the same problem. Haven't got round to fixing it but have researched and found an excellent How To on Steve W's Unity1 site. [Loads of other good info on there too.]

Once you're there, scroll all the way down the left hand menu, it's then the 11th item up from the bottom - entitled Headlight Bounce

Edited June 1, 2007 by Tentenths

[fmxa]

Thanks for that!

[Simon350S]

Mine wobble like mad when your driving along......

But mine is slightly different as I have masses of play in the gears of the motor itself.....

Never mind, something else to fix...!!!!!

Simon

[th4neuk]

Yep mine did the same on the turbo.

I had to take the pod off to drill the old rivets out and put new joints in. Tried the arms first but that did bugger all.

It is a bit of a fiddle though and as per the usual of working on these cars it helps if you break your arms in three places first.

Cheers

[OwenGT3]

Hi,

I've been busy today fixing this annoying problem of the headlight pods vibrating. The fix really needs two new arms, but as I haven't got any at the moment I did the best I could. Luckily I'm a hoarder, so I have hundreds of spare parts and selected fixing items to remedy problems such as this. The first thing I did was to remove the whole arm from the lights and motor. Also I had to remove one of the lights, because Lotus in their wisdom decided to fit a captive plate with nuts on, but didn't actually attach it to the light pod, so when I came to refit I had to locate the captive nut plate. This wasn't too major, just remove a light.

With the arm off I was able to work on the bench to repair the arm. I had a good look and the ball centres were worn, so to temporally sort this until I get new ones I removed the ball heads then placed them in the vice one at a time, end to end and gently nipped them. By doing this it nipped the balls in the cups so they now didn