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After 30 years of savings, bought the Pantera I always wanted. Runs good and is sound car. Last night lights went up but when switched off lights went out but did not go down.
I hand cranked them down and turned on again and they went up but not down.
Any thoughts on switch, mechanism,or something else.
Thanks Toby
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Hi Toby,

Congrats on your Pantera purchase and welcome to the forum!!! There are a lot of great people here that are more than willing to help solve Pantera issues!

Your headlight problem is most likely the down limit switch, located between the front trunk bulkhead and the headlight bucket torque bar (the round tube that connects to both light buckets). The key needs to be on for the buckets to lower.

With the key on and the headlight switch off, try tapping on the down limit switch. If that doesn't work, use a jumper wire to connect the two switch wires together. That should make the light buckets go down.

The limit switch that is located next to the radiator is the up limit switch.

John
Trum,Try taking them apart and cleaning them. The two nuts that hold them on are easy to get out and you have to remove them to change them any way. After they are off they just split in the middle with a small screw driver. The insides look like a set of points and are a simple open/close contactor. Just clean them and the connections at the wires real good and re-install. Mine did the same thing when I first bought it and cranking them down by hand sucks. That was 5 years ago and they have worked perfectly ever since. You have nothing to lose, it take about an hour and no parts require.
Hey Trum, as 1715 said, these are some of the simplest switches in the world. If you take them apart and clean them up there is a very good chance they will work properly for you.
If not, I had one that was broken to pieces, so I replaced mine with a generic switch found at a computer supply store like Altex. They had an assortment of them.
As you can see in the picture, I lengthened the bolt that operates the "up" switch because I have the low profile lights from Kirk Evans that don't have to open as far. You can bend the tab and make them just like stock if you want to. I put these on when factory ones were not available just to get me through inspection, etc. It's been 12 years now and they still work fine.
I did have to do some bending of the lever on the other limit switch, but don't have a good picture of it.
I think the switches cost something like $7.50 each. I haven't seen a reason to go back to the expensive ones as these have worked so good for so long.
Good luck,
Mike

p.s. Forgive the dust, I've just been for a drive

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I had one Pantera that did the same thing. After chasing power with a VOM, I found that on this '73, the power wire for the raise/lower motor is sourced off a side-lug on the headlight switch.... and someone had plugged onto the wrong lug. Simply moving the power wire from the normally-unused side-lug to the correct one right next to it fixed this cars headlight-raise problem. Good thing I had a working Pantera sitting next to it for comparison.

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