General Maintenance & Repairs - Headlight Problem - not the usual kind

Not sure which section to put this.....

my driver's side headlight is driving me crazy.

a while ago it stopped working, meaning it quite going up and down. The actual light is fine.
i did some checking and the most common problem is the little gear inside craps out. Mine didn't make any sound or any grinding noise or anything, so i decided it wasn't the gear. I checked the fuses, and everything was good. I went ahead and bit the bullet and bought a new motor. during testing, i could see the new one was getting power and was working. just to be sure, it tested the old one and still nothing. I put the new one in and it was fine...sort of.

Every now and then it wouldn't work. it either wouldn't go down or wouldn't go up. I remember seeing how the terminals were a little corrodid (sp?) when i put the new one in and thought maybe the connection was bad.

All week it's been giving me trouble, not going down, so i finally took it apart last night and "cleaned" the terminals. i checked the fuses again and everything was good. i also noticed that the bottom of the "arm" that connects the motor gear to the headlight assembly was just barely rubbing the bottom bolt that holds the motor in place. i took it out and added a couple washers on teh bolt's head side to "suck in" the nut. It clears it with no problems now.

It still doesn't work right. Today when i got off of work, it didn't come up! I got out and manually cranked it up. when i got home, it went down with no problems.

Any idea what's going on?

Here's a link u might want to look into. I'm not sure it helps but ill keep looking.

http://www.bfranker.badz28.com/headlightfix/

Maybe you got a bad rebuilt motor?

usually if it's a gear issue, the motor will make a weird "grinding" noise....which mine doesn't. (at least i'm lead to believe it supposed to make a grinding noise.)

what are some other problems it might be?

a bad connection somewhere?

thursday and friday, i had to manually crank them up, but they went down just fine.

is there anybody here that can help me?

i know this really isn't a "high performance" problem, but it's still a problem. when i turn them on nothing happens; not a sound, not a nothing (driver's side only). The light comes on, but the door doesn't pop up.

leaving them on, i usually go around the crank it up by hand. they go down just fine, so i'm guessing i'm getting power to the motor and it spins, but why only in the down motion.

any body got any ideas?
(i don't think it's a gear issue.)

It could be the gear. Your teeth may be so far gone that you don't get grinding.

Have you tried cranking the door open half way manually to see what happens? Does it go the rest of the way up on its own? If so - its a gear issue.