Hey guys does any one use these head light motors? Both mine are grinding and I need to know if these would be worth buying. Thanks.

 

any help?

 

The motors grind because the plastic gears wear out from misalignment or being overtorqued when the light hits its stops. The only real upgrade is making sure the stops are solid and using a motor with more screws to hold the gear mechanism in.

 

so i should buy these?

 

No, buy these instead

 

I think not. Why pay almost $100 for replacement gears when you can get both motors for only $75? Both will fix the problem for a while but the motors are less expensive and less work - you have to remove and reinstall the motors either way but you don't have to take them apart if you replace the entire motor. The original motors are already 20 years old so it's unlikely you would have to replace them again. If you really want the best of both worlds you could get the Cardone motors (82-9124H and 82-9125H) for about $66 each... they have removable gear covers which means you could easily swap in $5 plastic replacement gears in the future should you ever need them.

 

Sure, you can put in new motors but eventually they are going to start grinding again because the plastic gears break. Put in the metal gears and save yourself the embarrassment of grinding gears, you'll never have to touch them again. That's what I did with my 25 yr old motors and I've never had a problem since. I suppose it comes down to your budget and how long you plan to keep the car.

 

Do you have a link to where those metal gears can be purchased? Mine haven't failed yet, just hedging my bets for the future.

 

I wouldn't get metal gears on the chance that you might have a future problem. You might never have the problem.

I know it seems that metal gears would logically last longer than plastic ones and they do for the most part but they aren't immune to the problem. Replacing gears takes care of the symptoms without actually resolving the underlying problem. The underlying problem is the motor loosening away from the gear housing causing the gears not to mesh as closely as they should and making them grind against each other. In other words, the gears don't grind because they break - they break because they grind. This will chew up metal gears as well as plastic ones (although the metal ones will generally last longer) so both types will eventually fail if that problem is present and isn't fixed. We have members here who have had to go back and replace metal gears only a couple of years after first installing them.

Replacing gears is a messy job of removing a cover that GM did not intend to be removed and then sealing it again after replacing the gears. Since it's already been 15-20 years for these cars, there is no reason to believe that good replacement motors (like the Cardones) wouldn't last another 15-20 years or even longer. And even if the gears should happen to fail again, being able to replace them with $5 plastic replacements inside a cover that was designed to be removed is much easier and less expensive.