Installing hella 500ff, puzzled...

I need a little help here - installed everything as the diagram shows but no lights when I flick the switch.
Details:

The relay is wired as so:
Black wire with splice to black wire on each corresponding light.
Blue to ground
Red to positive batt terminal
Yellow to center pole of switch






The blue ground wire of each lamp runs to the hood release bolt:




The switch I didn't bother wiring ground or to battery since I really don't care if the switch lights up...

I have a pretty good concept of electronics, built a few guitar pedals from scratch, and haven't run into a problem like this before

Any ideas? I have a dmm, but no idea how to use, never needed it to troubleshoot before.

 

Do the lights work if you go directly red to the positive terminal and
black to the negative terminal on the battery?

I might be a bit confused by what you wrote, but black would normally be ground. Not blue.

 

I may be missing something but do you have only one wire running to the switch? If so, that's the problem. You need at least 2 wires to feed through the switch.

 

x2 you need power in and power to the lights (via relay)

 

Yeah, for whatever reason the wiring kit comes with has black as power and blue as ground.

I thought the switch just needed the one wire for switching, on/off. The other two poles on switch are for power to switch light and one for grounding power.


I'll post up link to diagram in a min

Yeah I'm gonna just wire up the lights to power and ground directly and see if they come on. May be a bad relay?

 

well from what you listed there is something missing... your lights will get 12vdc from relay and they can be grounded directly to the chassis or battery... then the relay will need a ground and a signal from a toggle switch to come on.. then lastly you'll need a source to send to the lights ie. battery .. so if this is a conventional relay with common pin numbers. connect pin 30 to battery (fused) connect pin 87 to lights (possitive) connect ground to 86 and your switch to 85 and then connect the other end of the switch to a 12vdc supply and that should make your lights work... i might have pins 85 and 86 reversed.. i do this a lot.

 

Custom guitar pedals build me a delay pedal

 

You have to have power/ground to the switch so that when you flip it, it sends a 12v signal to the relay to switch on (the switch also lights up - but that isn't the main purpose of power/ground going to it - any switch you use with have to have +/- hooked up as well as the wire going out to the relay). With no power going through the switch, it is doing nothing when you flip it. You may also want to swap those wire nuts for some crimp on connectors, they will hold up much better on a vehicle since wire nuts are designed for solid copper wire and not stranded wire. They could potentially rattle loose so you can save yourself some troubleshooting headaches later.

 

What he said above...

Basically you need to add a + positive wire to the switch using the 12v battery and technicaly a ground wire. So the switch either labels or in the directions needs one wire that is 12v, one wire connected to the relay to power the lights, and one ground. Then you should have Light!
Edit: if u don't want the LED on the switch to light up when ON then just unhook the ground wire to the switch, the lights will stil work but just no LED on switch.

Defiantly don't want to be messing with wires in the future with those wire nuts. crimps are better but solder is best! And electric tape the shit out of all the wire joints/connections as if the wires were to go be drenched in water.

 

Just hook up the switch with a power source, the ground isn't necessary unless you want the light in the switch to work.

 

^^That's funny I just edited my post to state that.

 

Oh. The switch isn't in the circuit. Der.... I'll fix it.

Oh and the crimp/twisty was just to make sure everything works before soldering.

Can I hook switch direct to battery? Or does it have to come from fuse box?

 

I haven't built one but they look like fun! I think it works by cascading fet chips.

I gig with the home built pedals, sound so money. Check out 'build your own clone' - solder by number kits, lots of fun! My two tube screamer clones from them with built in boost get used a lot.

 

Ya i want to get into building them my buddies does a lot of it and converting amps to tube. What type of music do you play

 

Either way. If it is direct to battery you can turn them on with the truck off.

 

True enough. Down side of direct off battery is if you accidently turn them on and don't notice (like during daylight situations) you can run your battery down. I wired all of mine using add a circuits from the under dash fuse panel on circuits that are off when the key is turned off. There is an even higher chance of missing that the lights are on if you're not going to wire the switch LED. Just my opinion FWIW.

 

Used to play a lot of pop punk, and a little metal here and there. I was in a band called ODF (oblivious dead frogs) and 'Fragile Stage'. Now mostly playing Christian music @ churches. You?

If you can find the time you should def make a pedal, lots of fun!

 

Hardcore mainly melodic hardcore stuff along those lines. Alot of acoustic stuff to. Ya i,need a good reverb delay pedal I'll look into it

 

If it makes you feel better, I hooked up some 500s a few weeks ago and l forgot to put 2 fuses in my add-a-circuit and spent a whole day cussing and moving ground wires around because I couldn't figure out why my switch didn't work. I bought a factory fog switch on eBay and used it instead of the hella one - that's an option.

Good to know you're soldering!!

You can go straight to battery, but you run the small risk of leaving the lights on and killing your battery. You can tap the fuse box in the cab with an add-a-circuit and save running and extra wire back out to under the hood. Either way will work though.

 

Haha, that's pretty funny! I did a similar boneheaded thing with add a fuse installing my cb

Not worried about leaving them on - only times I will use them, it will be dark enough that you can't 'forget' to turn them off.

Thanks for the help everyone and explainin the switch/relay wiring to me. First time I've used a relay.

Lights fired up like a charm: