So I had my headlights wired up with a home-brew harness with two relays and about a week ago the high beams started freaking out, and then nothing. I swapped a bunch of relays around, traced wiring...nothing fixed it.
I went back to the stock headlight connectors which I cleaned and got a little bit of corrosion out of. No the high beams come on and flicker, like a very fine flicker; almost like on the motorcycle.
Because the stock connector is what "flips" the relay to high beam I'm thinking thats the issue, so I dived into the fuses and such and nothing.....
Any ideas, it sound kind of like a high beam switch on the column but just want a few opinions and ideas. Thanks. :cheers2:
You can use a multi meter to watch for the fluctuations from the switch.
I use a home brew harness with 2 relays no issues. Maybe a ground not big enough or dirty.
XJ headlight switches are know to stuggle with carrying full amperage load of the lights. The purpose of the re-harnessing is to shift the load to relays fed directly from the battery thus bypassing the switch with the load. I'd pull a quick test wire from the battery positive terminal to the relay trigger to see if they come on properly. If they do, the relays aren't getting a good trigger signal from the switch. If they don't then you have homebrew harness issues. The dim lights and flickering you noted seems to indicate a bad connection.
After I took out the homebrew headlight harness and spruced everything up with a combination of dental tools, a wire brush, spray electrical contact cleaner, and dielectric grease.....it seems the high beams will still flicker but only when the Jeep is off. Low beams are fine. It's still a little perplexing considering I'm running a pretty large platinum battery and 4AWG cables for EVERYTHING related to the charging system. But it's all working.
When you say high beams flicker, what is fluctuating? The voltage of coil signal to the relay or the power from the battery under load.
Is it bright/dim or on/off?
There's not much to go wrong here. If the relays are hooked up properly only a very small amount of power is needed from the light switch. You should have a very strong connection to the contacts of the relay from the battery (via fuse).
Everything was good with the lights, I noticed when the Jeep is off when I switch on lights they are good, you switch to high beam you get a bright/dim flicker for a few and it's only for a few seconds.....then it just stops and the high beams stay on no problems....I think it was a combination of using the wiring harness and dirty connections. Since they are LED I went back to stock harness and have had no further issues.
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