Morris Minor Owners Club

Hi all you electrical boffins, I have some sealed beam headlights in my garage and I would like to test them to see if they are ok. A simple wiring connector or the like would possibly do so how would i go about it. Now bear in mind , that I know absolutely nothing about car electrics. On mungo they are the ordinary bulb headlights so I can't test them on the car. Any info would be great.

Well they are quite high current, so you would need a car battery to test them, and the correct connectors and 10 amp cable. However, if you buy a very cheap little multimeter, you can do Ohms checks across the headlight connections. Cheapo multimeters cost £5 and have lots of uses on the car, and around the home.

A very simple test is to shake them gently, if they rattle inside they are broken.

There are three terminals - one is a common earth and the other two feed to the two filaments - one each. Just use a couple of leads from the battery and touch them on the terminals in pairs - in turn. If you touch across the two 'feeds' then both filaments should glow relatively dimmly - although if either filament is broken then nothing will happen. Otherwise - touching the earth and one of the filament feeds should make the lamp shine brightly. Hold it for a few seconds - sometimes when they are old they only last a very short time and then burn out - this may be because the protective gas has leaked out of the sealed unit. New ones are not too expensive - and note that the 75 watt main beam versions are available again. However - it really is very much better to just convert to Halogen bulbs in modern units. These are readily available (Wipac and many others) for Minis and give you the option to use (or not as you wish) the facilty to have the parking/side lamp inside the headlamp.

well thanks for your input, very helpful, as soon as it stops hissing down I will go down the garden to the garage and test them.
cheers

well thanks for your input . it was very helpful and straight forward. I tested the lights as you described and they are all working perfectly.
cheers mungo

Good - just fit the ones with the least amount of rust on the back!