Headlight issues (weak, bouncing, ground wire breaking off, wires melting)

Headlights can get very hot. Eventually, there is the possibility that the headlight connectors can become discoloured, hard, brittle and cracked. This could result in loss of power to the headlighting system.

Typically, the wiring harness connector will look like this after prolonged heat exposure:
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At first, I opted for the quick fix. I spliced in another connector. This made the housing very crowded and the shroud that covers the light assembly would no longer stay on. Eventually, I had to opt for plan B - a new headlight wiring harness.

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It was supposed to be a matter of simply unplugging the old harness and plugging in the new one. Reality is seldom that simple. Among other things, the parking light bulb is also powered by this harness. It also had to be disconnected from the old harness. Easier said than done. The bulb is contained inside a rubber sheath that gets plugged into the headlight housing. It is very difficult to remove. In my case, I remove the housing, but the bulb remained inside the headlight assembly. So, my easy job went from this:

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to this:

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Once the assembly was removed, it was an easy to dump out the old bulb along with 4 or 5 oz of black debris. Not sure what it was, but it was now a fine powder.

The finished assembly looks like this:

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