BoxheadTim

Otherwise known as #3157296 in a long list of reason why I don't like working on my daily driver.

I've had issues with an occasionally intermittent passenger headlight on my 01 996 cab with Litrontics for a while. It was occasional enough to not bother me excessively but it was time to change out the headlight washers (jets had blown out as usual) and I figured this was a good time to investigate.

Turns out that the male connector wasn't inserted correctly into its mounting bracket and someone jammed home the yellow clip to hold it in anyway. As a result the male connector is lose at the top, won't slide into the headlight correctly and has now gone from intermittent to no contact.

The yellow clip does appear to be in the correct position (all the way up) and holds in the bottom part of the connector. I'm not able to remove it to take out the headlight connector, reseat it and clip everything back together as I don't appear to be able to unhook the clip.

Does anybody have any tips on removing this yellow clip? It doesn't appear to be locked place by by any obvious mechanism, but a fair number of attempts at trying to push/pull/lift it so I can move it down have failed. Investigating the area around the clip doesn't show any obvious locking mechanism.

dporto

I think it slides up and out of the bracket

Montychristo128

Yep you can pull it up and off. I had to remove mine as set of ebay lights I bought to get through safety had a cracked housing that would not allow light to seat correctly, so I ended up pulling off this clip and feeding the light cable through the fitting and hooked up lights directly. You can still fit/remove them like this, BTW.

This is in combination with a damaged base (fixed with cable ties!!!) so I had no real worries about breaking it.

BoxheadTim

Here's a bad picture of the offending clip:



I'm not quite sure regarding the "up" part? It's all the way up already and unfortunately so far doesn't really want to move in any direction.

Montychristo128

So it goes down to release the male fitting and then slides up and off, I may have used a screw driver for additional leverage, mine was (is) still in the car.

BoxheadTim

Success at last.

The "trick" was to push the blue connector downwards. It would move a tiny bit and unlock the retaining clip. Then it's easy to remove the retaining clip.

Unfortunately it turned out that the body of the blue connector has had some damage and that's why it's loose in the bracket even with the clip in place. At least it looks like it's possible to get a replacement connector housing.

dporto

One of mine was like that when I got my car. The blue connector is around $13 from Autoatlanta.com I think the yellow clip may be a separate item - also pretty inexpensive though. Good luck

Drew66

Parts are cheep but looks like I need a $40 terminal pin tool kit on Amazon. But I like to buy tools.

Boff

If this works for you post a link! I have to do this as well, and I was just gonna try a paper clip.

dporto

I bought the connector pin tools from ECS - nice kit around $40-$50 (when I bought it a few years ago). Includes tools for a bunch of different car/connector brands...