quote:Boss W, by the sound of it its OK to run without them if you have got away with it for 30 years but there is an awful lot of play in the whole mechanism. Won't the headlights bounce around when in the up position and when driving.
True- we've had the car since April 1980. For 10 of those years I didn't even know there were supposed to be bushings there. You do get grinding, squealing noises during both up & down motion from steel-on-steel rubbing. All the headlight bushings I've seen do have lips on them but they are likely all of local mfgr, so all dimensions vary a bit except the ID that fits on on the cross-pipe. The lip cutaways make the bushings a little more flexible; I suggest warming plastic bushings before installing as the twisting to install seems pretty severe. Ice-cold plastic is more likely to crack.
Bushings seem to not be the problem with headlight-jiggle regardless of whether you have round or rectangular headlights, but is the result of the depth of mesh of the sector gear teeth with the drive motor gear teeth. A simple adjustment of the motor mounting plate bolts (holes are slotted for this adjustment) downward fixes the jiggles at no cost & hardly any labor. I've also seen a few Panteras where the stock headlight sector gear is bent & wobbles during use- maybe from a collision fixed by a non-Pantera specialty shop- so the motor drive-gear nearly rides off the big sector gear. A crow-bar or vice-grip pliers on the welded steel sector gear easily 'adjusts' that problem.