08 Touraeg headlight assembly replacement

Here is what I did. I have adaptive bi-xenons.
Replacing the insulation on the harness just takes patience.

Here is the method I used.
Remove the harness from the assembly. It is fiddly but all of the harness will come out of the assembly.
DO EACH WIRE IN TURN
Remove all of the insulation from an individual wire that had not already fallen off;
Cut that wire in two;
Re-insulated each half with heat-shrink and shrunk it down;
Fed a 25mm piece of heat-shrink on one half;
Crimp the both halves together using crimps used for crimping fishing wire traces using the smallest crimps you can find for the wire size;
Fed the 25mm piece of heat-shrink over the crimp;
Shrink the heatshrink over the crimp.
Replace the harness into the assembly as best as you can.

There are plenty of threads on this subject. Do a search and have a read.

Just one question: did you have to open up the housing to get the harness out, or can it be removed without opening? Also, if you can elaborate a bit more on the process of removal of the harness from the box, it'd be much appreciated.

Click to expand...

I did not open the assembly.
It is a while since I did it.
I took the all the bulbs out and removed all the electronic control units.
Removed all the rubber covers and the plastic cover over an opening that is clipped in place. It is under one of the units
All of the harness can come out through the rear openings.
There seems to be three "compartments" in the assembly. Some wires go from the control units through openings between "compartments" Make a note of what wire goes where.

All the connectors in the assembly are different so you cannot reconnect the wrong connectors

Just take time. You may have to cut a couple cable ties or similar. I did not replace any of these.
However I did use cable ties to group the wires together.