I cannot easily swivel my lights left and right, so I would like to try and get the left right aim especially right before SVA - does anyone have any
clever methods for measuring it at home?
James
Park your tin top next to it , or facing a wall and mark the points for when you put your lovely kit car there.
Make that a modern tin top that you know is half decent in terms of aim! My MOT chap always adjusts my lamps at test time. They always have some
slight movement in them after six months of blasting.
[Edited on 24/2/09 by SeaBass]
Just stolen off the internet, so don't know if it is accurate. But I seem to remember doing something similar with my mini and a garage door.
Mike
I think that diagram is for countries that drive on the right surely?!
quote:
Originally posted by cloudy
I think that diagram is for countries that drive on the right surely?!
Sorry
Try this 
better
Cheers
Mike
clever.
ROTFL.....
Nice one!
Rotflmao!
You can't compare to a tintop, the requirements are based on the ANGLES left/right/up/down, not the actual height.
What you need to do is mark the exact positions of the lights on a wall, back the car away from it (straight!), and make sure the lights are pointing
straight forward and about 1.5% downwards.
I.e. if you back up 10m and you are looking for the beam cutoff to be 15cm below headlamp height, 5m and it's 7.5cm. The change in angle at the
kick up should be directly in front of the lamps.
Dip beam has to point downwards by between 0.5% and (I think) 2.5%. 0.5% is equivalent to half an inch downwards, if the car is 10 ft from a wall.
Park the car on a bit of level ground against a wall and mark the headlamp centres onto the wall, make sure you have the horizontal AND vertical
centres right.
Then move back and park say 10 feet from the wall, but still at the same level, and put on dip beam. The dip pattern is like a half circle of light
with a horizontal cutoff and with a "peak" to the left to light up the verge. The peak joins the horizontal line at a distinct angle. That
point where the angle joins is the centre of the beam. That should line up with the centre marks you made, but half an inch (or maybe slightly more)
below.
It's very important that the car is at right angles to the wall and still in line with the original marks.