Hello everyone, so I was driving my mother's Ford Ranger until I bought my 2001 Rav4 and the headlights were horribly dim. I did some research and found that it's possible to build a new wiring harness that bypasses the super thin stock wires. Basically get 2 relays, cut the 3 wires at the plug going to the headlight closest to the battery. On each relay run a fused wire from pin 30 direct to the positive side of the battery, run a wire from each pin 85 to the chassis, and run a wire from each pin 86 to the respective high beam and low beam wires going back to the switch inside. Get 2 new headlight connectors and run the negative wire from each side to the chassis then finally run a wire from pin 87 on the new low beam relay to the low beam wire of the new connector for each headlight. Do the same thing from pin 87 on the high beam relay to the high beam wire on each side. And voila, the headlights are now very much brighter than before.

Now, here's where I ran into trouble with my Rav4. Evidently Toyota uses a floating negative to activate the headlights instead of positive 12v power. With a multimeter and the negative leader at the battery I am getting 12v at all 3 wires without the switch turned on. So 1st thing is do I need to switch the wires on pins 30 and 85? And if so, I think that the red w/yellow stripe is the high beam, so then is the red w/black stripe the low beam? And what do I do with the red wire on the left headlight and the red/green wire on the right headlight? And do I need to run a wire to the chassis from each headlight? If anyone has a wiring diagram for the headlights I would love to see it. The picture is the harness as it's built right now.




Cheers,

Uriah Giles