Headlight Flash with Sidelights On
As standard, if your sidelights are on and you flash your headlights (being super-polite, us Gen5 drivers often do this to let little old ladies out at junctions, for example) the lights flash, go out and then stay up. This is silly, and very daft of the original designers.
This simple mod allows you to flash your lights and have them retract immediately, sidelights on or not.
1. Remove dash trim under steering wheel. Two screws on left of steering column, two under ignition (possibly behind a plastic plate if it's still there ...), one on bottom left of panel and one on bottom right (have to remove kick-plate to get to that one - it just pops off, starting at the rear pillar. There may be a thing holding the front of it on in the footwell - again, if it's still there and hasn't been previsouly discarded).
2. On the 185, if you look up slightly to the right of the steering column, you'll see a little blue box about the size of a fag packet behind the air duct, like this ...
(I seem to remember it was in a slightly different place in the 182, but I could be wrong. It's the only fag-packet sized blue box in the area, anyway!)
Remove the air duct - it should come away pretty easily without too much force. That way you can see the little blue box more clearly - it's the headlight retractor control.
The blue box should slide off its bracket towards the passenger side of the car. Slide it off and unplug the wiring connector.
3. The wire we're concerned with is the pink one, which goes into connection 6. Like this ...
At this point you have two options. You can simply snip this wire, in which case your headlights will always retract after you flash them with sidelights on - but they'll also retract if you switch them on and return the stalk switch to the "dot" position.
Or you can snip it and insert a simple on-off switch. This will give you the capability of leaving the lights up for bulb-changing purposes, cleaning, etc. This is much more sensible. You can see in the pic below that I've used green/yellow insulating tape where I've spliced a switch into the pink wire (arrowed). I put my switch where the headlight washer switch goes in UK cars (arrowed), but you can run it to wherever you want.
The switch-blanking plates that Mr T uses to cover up unused holes in the dash can be drilled or otherwise cut to accommodate your new switch, leaving no unsightly gaps or globs of glue.
4. Reattach wiring connector to box, slide back onto bracket, replace air duct, replace dash trim.
A very easy mod, and one of the most useful I think ...
