Anyone try the AMD or OER 2gen repro headlight switches?

[375instroke]

With the AMD being twice the price of the OER, do you get what you pay for?  With Mopar parts, there's a lot of gouging, so who knows?

[metallicareload99]

I have the OER switch, it seems nice enough, but I haven't tried it yet.... I find it hard to believe more than one company is reproducing these. And even so what could make it worth twice the price?

[Dino]

I would use the switch to power a relay to keep the juice out of the switch, regardless whoch one you get.

[metallicareload99]

I would use the switch to power a relay to keep the juice out of the switch, regardless whoch one you get.

Part of the reason I didn't try the OER switch yet is because I've been using a relay for the headlights for years now

[MaximRecoil]

The chances of more than one company having independently reproduced these headlight switches, all of which became available at the same time, and all of which look identical (including the natural yellowish color of the plastic as opposed to the white plastic of the originals), are somewhere between zero and none.

I first tried to buy an OER one last summer from Jegs and it was out of stock. I tried again a few weeks ago but they were still out of stock. Other places that stocked it were charging more than Jegs and/or they were an unknown quantity, so I paid a little extra (but not nearly as much as AMD is asking) to buy one from YearOne's eBay store (since the shipping was a little cheaper than buying it from YearOne's regular website), and it's excellent quality as far as I can tell. The chrome is perfect, the clicks into each switch position feel good, its screw holes lined up perfectly with the instrument cluster's mounting holes, the vacuum switch part of it doesn't leak, and both the vacuum switch and the electrical switch work perfectly so far.

For the record, I've had my headlights on relays for about a dozen years, so this new reproduction headlight switch doesn't have to deal with any significant amount of current, so I don't know how well it would handle the much greater current of the factory headlight wiring. The reason I put the relays in there in the first place is because my original switch could no longer handle the headlight current; the switch would heat up to the point of being almost too hot to touch, and the headlights would suddenly shut off while driving down the road at night and wouldn't come back on until the switch cooled down (I believe there's a self-resetting thermal fuse in there). Putting the relays in there extended the usable life of the original headlight switch for many more years, but last summer it started getting flaky, i.e., sometimes when you turned it on the headlights would come on but not the tail, license plate, and front valance lights.