Looks clean and proper now and not that broken and bent mess it was.

All I can say is that it pays to have parts cars. Trying to hunt all these extra parts down would take a long and would be very expensive piecing this back together. A good (not bent nor corroded) complete hide-a-way '68 headlamp assembly easily goes for a grand or more.

Now for the headlamp motor wiring under the dash. I will need a SPDT relay, two fuses and a non hide-a-way headlamp switch.

Here's how it's wired. The Ford Probe motor has 4 wires; a constant ground, constant B+ and an UP and DOWN wire in which one gets fed B+ at a time. If you feed both the headlamp motor spins constantly (basically constantly blinking the doors at you).

The ground is a no brainer, the constant B+ will get fed from the ignition switch via a 15 amp fuse for reasons I'll explain in a bit.

The UP and DOWN are switched to B+ via the relay and also through the 15 amp fuse to the ignition switch. The relay coil itself is fed from the headlamp out wire of the headlamp switch via a 2 amp fuse.

The operation is simple. When you pull out the headlamp switch all the way to headlamps, the relay will switch ignition B+ from the DOWN wire to the UP wire on the Ford Probe motor and the doors will open as long as the ignition is in run or acc.

The reason I did this is for two reasons. First to make changing the headlamp bulbs easier, all you have to do is with the headlamps on and doors open is turn the ignition off and then the headlamp switch. This will leave the doors open for easy access without having to reach underneath for the manual knob.

The second reason, if something should fail in the Ford Probe motor (there are relays in there) and they stick on for whatever reason, they won't drain the battery with the ignition off and not feeding it. It's just a failure mode that can leave you stranded otherwise and this avoids that. Need to think ahead and out of the box when doing things like this.

Here's the XL's hide-a-way headlamp switch with its snake like hoses cluttering up valuable space under the dash.

This Ford vacuum hide-a-way is so badly designed, there's so many weird bandaid fixes in the design like this reducer in the DOWN vacuum hose. Without this and the smaller vacuum lines those heavy headlamp doors would really jack hammer down when closing.

I give this Ford vacuum hide-a-way headlamps design The Chrysler Award and believe you me it's not meant to be complimentary. For those wondering I abhor Chrysler products.

I was able to remove the vacuum lines from the firewall grommet, clean it (sandblast it) and push it back in and run the motor harness through it so it wouldn't rub on the metal firewall.

Now I didn't wire in the relays, so for the interim the low beams are powered through the headlamp switch. I need a break from this as I spent 3 weeks on these darn headlamps.

Click here to see the finished working video of the headlamps

It turns out this also fixed intermittent rougher idle as this vacuum system had so many small intermittent leaks; hoses, switch, tank, and servo. Engine runs so smoothly all the time now, it was just running lean at times due to these vacuum headlamp doors.

Here's some of the old crap of the XL. There's an extra vacuum servo in there as I was testing all my spares and they all leaked as the seals are shot from age.

There will be more to come when I do the relays and circuit breaker wiring, for now I'm taking a break from this car and going back to work on the 1966 gal 500 XL.