97 Headlamp Motor Replacement

[Arcangel224]

:confused I was wondering how hard is this to do myself. :cool I have a working knowledge of general automitive maintenance. ad My left motor is going out. I got a used one and was wondering if I could merely switch out the gears or is it easier to replace the whole thing.

Thanks

 

[Tony1Leo]

It takes about 40 minutes to replace the entire motor. Most of the time is lost because it is such a tiny space to work in, so unscrewing it is slow. You can take out the three bolts holding on the gear and just replace the gear. It's easier on the right side. I haven't tried it on the left. You need to look at the gear anyway. It's made of plastic which causes the problems. It just strips under pressure, so make sure the used one is good if you replace the entire motor.

 

[schmaltzr]

I've rebuilt both of mine. You have to take the black plastic that covers the headlamp housing off to get into the back side of the bolts holding the left headlamp on. On your '97 after you remove the motor I believe you have 3 screws to take the housing for the gear apart. On my 2000 I had to re-epoxy the housing when I took it apart. You can purchase brass gears that will never wear out on the WEB. Look on Ebay. I can't remember the guys name, but he also sells Fiero headlamp parts and he made a quality product for $39 or so dollars a side (much cheaper than the OEM replacement) and 10 times better. When you take the motor off you will find a stack of 3 washers between the gear housing and the bracket on the left side. These are spacers to shim the motor so that it will hit the actuation stops correctly. Don't remove these washers or your headlamps will go up and down and up and down until you stop them manually. I replaced my washers with one additional nut on each bolt as the spacer (between the gear assembly housing and the mounting bracket). Now I don't have to worry about loosing the washers if I take them off again. One nut is about the same thickness as the 3 stacked washers. The right side doesn't have any extra washers between the headlight motor housing and the mounting bracket. Remember that there is a grease hole on the front of the housing directly in line with the motor shaft. I greased the assembly after I replaced the gears so I wouldn't have a problem gluing them together. Keeping up on the greasing probably would have prevented this problem in the first place, but very few people know about this piece of maintenance. The grease in my housing after 3 years was all dried up, no wonder the gears got eaten up.

 

[danl72]

I had my right headlight motor replaced by the dealer. It cost about $500 or so. Not sure of the price because it was covered under my extended warranty, but it was around there. So replacing it on your own if you don't have a warranty is a wise choice.

 

[Wisdom]

I had the same problem with the drivers side headlight motor on a 95 Firebird. Took it apart and saw the warped plastic gear. Unfortunately, in my troubleshooting (several years ago) I also took apart the drive motor assembly and out shot one of the brush springs. So if you do decide to take apart the actual motor part for whatever unknown reason, be very careful because the brush springs are very small and do blend in with concrete driveways and front lawns. The brushes are smart and move fast too. I could track one when it flew, but the other one went in the opposite direction and got away!

Then about 2 years ago, I came across a website that had directions on recovering the headlamp motor function by carefully repositioning the nylon gear so the the remaining 'good' side was contacting the metal worm gear. (From human memory) They did that by carefully taking the assembly apart enough to separate the metal worm drive from the nylon gear, and then turning the nylon gear 180 degrees so that the metal worm gear interfaced with a good run of plastic. I never tried it due to time constraints and the lack of some brushes. But it seemed very plausible to me. Back then I found the site using a google search for Firebird headlights.

- Wisdom