Has been a while but finally got this sorted. At first ended up using a single 40A relay from a handful a friend gave me. Seems that one out of half a dozen tried was happy to remain OFF until the HIGH BEAM was selected.
All other relays wanted to switch on the LOW BEAM lights at the same time as the DRL which are the HIGH BEAM at half strength on 6V.
Really wanted to use two relays so I modified a Narva brand 30A relay as it has a removable cover, not seam welded as the others are. What I did was bend the copper band which acts like a spring and provides the lever action to hold open the contact arm back until power is applied.
Tweaking the amount of bending found a sweet spot where the relay would remain OFF with the DRLs running, but would switch ON the LOW BEAM when the HIGH BEAMS were on. You can see in the photo the green arrow pointing to
the arm that needs to be bent.
After that success decided to try tweaking the original DOUBLE NARVA 30A relay which I reall wanted to use. The double relay is neat and uses a single mount. These relays use a wound coil spring to hold open the contacts so tried using solder to build up the height hoping to add extra tension to the spring.
This was an abject failure so decided to solder some nickel silver from a piece of model railway track as an attaching point increasing the spring tension. As luck would have it by soldering it at an offset to the lower pivot gave it the right tension where it remains off at 6-7volts but closes at 12V. You can see in the photo the new higher spring mount.
Soldering up the other relay gave similar results that I was able to test with a 0-12V DC transformer and multimeter. Next step is to try this on the Riviera and confirm the results.
Will be back.
Rodney
