Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Modifications Aesthetics Headlight/Foglight mod question

I have come up with a question after reading some info on one of the Ford F150 boards. This question is regarding the ability to turn your foglights on without having the headights on. I was reading that on the F150's headlight switch, it is similar to ours in the fact that you have to pull the switch out in the headlight mode to get the foglights to come on. According to this thread:

SVT Lightning Headlight Mod

and the forum questions here:

Ford F150 Message Board

they are taking out the switch and filing parts of it down so you can pull out the switch to turn on the headlights in any position. I know this may cause some problems, but has anyone thought about this? Has anyone taken out a switch to see if it's possible?


NOTE: Pictures are posted in that forum, although the switch looks different from ours, but maybe this is an idea someone can check on.

Has anyone done it? Yeah like 99% of the people on this board with factory fogs. its a 3 min mod thats really awesome. its in the faq on the main page. Good luck...

Aaron

DconNavi,

NO! You did not read everything!!!!!!! I am asking about modding the headlight switch so you can turn on the foglights on in ANY position, not just the mod done with the parking lights. I am already aware of that one!

ttt

OIC that looks cool indeed.

Scotty,
I have removed the switch once before and the way mine behaves is that you can pull the switch out in the parking light and in the headlight mode. There are two ball bearings inside which lock the switch from being pulled out in the off position. However, the issue on our fogs is not whether the switch can be pulled out or not, it is how to get the power to the fogs. You can pull the switch out all you like in any position if you modified the lockout, but the way Ford wired the switch in the Contour, the relay which controls power to the fogs does not close the circuit to the switch until the switch is turned to the headlight mode, and then power is routed to the switch via the relay to give the ability to the fogs to be turned off/on. The only way that a modification other than our relay is going to work is if you take the switch out and rewire it. Getting the switch to pull out is really not the issue here. If you mod the switch to pull out in the off position you will also need to mod the relay so that you have power to the fog light switch all the time... our current mod as I understand it only puts power to the relay when parking lights or headlights are turned on... the relay still opens the circuit when the switch is in the off position. Sorry if this does not answer your question but I did read everything and that is what I gathered from it, but I do hope that it helps. Good luck.

Fenderman, that's good enough. Once the switch has been modified to allow pull out in off position, it should be easy to wire. If you've done the fog/park fix already, it would be similar. Going by memory here...Instead of splicing the fog light relay into the parking light line, you'd just have to splice it a constant 12V which should be one of the wires. Easy to check with a volt meter.

Now, the only bad thing I see happening is, that the lights on chime may not work with fogs only and you could have a lot of dead batteries.

as an edit to my previous post, the ball bearings are responsible for holding the switch in the parking light/fog light/off positions, not for pulling out the fogs. Just for the purposes of this post I pulled my headlight switch out and apart and examined it. There are two tabs on the switch and they ride on runners contained inside the orange plastic housing. In the off position these runners have a small incline on them which forces the fog switch to be pulled in. You can grind the two tabs on the switch, but what I would do is since the switch is apart, I would grind the two inclines level with the rest of the runners and that would facilitate the switch to be pulled out in any position. If you are really wanting to do this mod, post here and I will give you instructions. Once again, I apologize for the error.

Fenderman, thanks for the work.