Problem with 1997 E11 headlight level motors

March 16, 2016

Greetings,

I'm new to these forums. Have been lurking without registering for a while, but I'm in need of assistance.

The car: 1997 Corolla E11, the pre-facelift model with round headlights, 1.6l petrol with a 4A-FE engine.

The situation: The front left of the car was damaged in an accident. A friend of mine and I had a go at DIY'ing the body parts back to shape and we did a fairly decent job. The only thing to be replaced was the lightbulb.

Apparently our work was not perfect and initially we had not aligned the body parts to which the headlight connects properly, as the headlight beam level was too high. We adjusted in manually to beam as low as possible, but then the motor spindle is screwed too tightly to move. After adjusting the headlight back to the higher level, the motor is able to move freely and control the light level again. After some experimenting and tuning, both of the motors suddenly stopped working. Even for the front right headlight, which was perfect prior to our DIY intervention (probably still is, just the motor doesn't work).

While the headlight level adjustment is not something I have ever used (I rarely have enough weight in the back in daytime, let alone night time when it would cause the most issues), it is required for the equivalent of the MOT in my country. I am having doubts about having burned the motors, because they both stopped working at the same time. I'm thinking it might be a fuse or relay issue. The problem is, I have checked both the owner's manual (in Italian, of which I have only a basic understanding, so I google-translated) and the wiring diagrams in the Hayes manual. I was not able to understand the wiring diagrams and I did not find a relevant fuse in the owner's manual.

Is there a fuse or a relay that could have got blown when the headlight level motors encountered resistance?

Many thanks in advance for any sort of clues or information.

P.S. I have checked the following thread, as it was the most relevant from my search results and I did not find it very helpful, as it's a slightly different situation.