[PaulE]

Thanks again Fred, the bench test did the trick! None of the components are burned out, everything works. As I originally said, I had assumed the power wires that put 12V into the canbus were black - negative and clear - positive. Well, that is backwards, and polarity of power going into the canbus matters. Once I tried reversing positive and negative power everything works on both sets. In my defense, nothing in any of the Morimoto instructions I could find says that the black wire is positive and the clear wire is negative. And when I was a kid and worked on simpler cars, black wires were for negative ground and red or other color wires were for positive.

I didn't need to try using the DMM to see what amps are being drawn, but since I had everything set up, I put the DMM in line on the circuit and saw it go from 0 -5.85/5.86 when I powered it up. It never went any higher and the light lit up pretty fast, so maybe it draws more on startup but it is so fast I can't see it. The DMM is 10 Amps max, and that didn't blow.

So now to reverse the power wires in the unit I've assembled and then put the second unit together which should go a lot faster!