low beam headlight range

[imac]

do any of you seem to have an unusually short range when using your low beams? my high beams are fantastic, but the low beams really seem to be aimed too short. if im driving in the middle of a 3 lane highway, i can light up all 3 lanes wide, but they look like they cut out about 30 ft in front of the car. you think there's something wrong with the auto adjustment, or are all of yours pretty short ranged too?

 

[clos561]

mine are good, u have a gt? theres a roller on the left side of the steering column near the doror that raises and lowers the height of the beam. try messing with that

 

[imac]

mine are good, u have a gt? theres a roller on the left side of the steering column near the doror that raises and lowers the height of the beam. try messing with that

s***, i completely forgot that existed on this car. i just ran out to my car to check where it was adjusted to, and right now its on 2. scale goes from 0 - 3, and im guessing 3 would make them the highest (give me the most range) so im not sure how much bumping it up that one notch will help, but its gotta do something. i'll give it a shot sometime tonight after work once it gets dark.

 

[icspots]

level 3 is actually the lowest. 0 is the normal setting with the idea being that as you add more weight to the car and the headlights shine higher in the air you turn the dial to aim them back down so as to not blind people. If you want a bit more then try this.

Pull your car up to a wall. Turn on your headlights on level 0 and then mark the beam pattern on the wall with tape. Readjust the aiming dial to 1. Now manually reaim the lowbeams (via a screwdriver on the adjustment screws) to match back up with the tape marks from the original level 0.

Once you're finished your headlights will be aimed in the same place as they were to begin with, but on level 1 instead of 0. This gives you the option to dial down to the new level 0 and have them shine higher. As this increases the chances of you blinding or pissing off oncoming traffic I recommend you not use the 0 setting unless you're not around a lot of traffic.

 

[imac]

yea, i was gonna try the manual adjustment, but wanted to see if there was something else i was missing because mine were hella low, not just in need of tweaking. i'll throw them on 0 and see if that's good enough. if not, i'll use the manual to move them up a bit and then just put the switch back on 1 if i encounter a decent amount of traffic.

thanks for the help guys. i'll especially appreciate it next time i almost hit an idiot deer again. already totalled one old car partially because of terrible headlights, so i definitely wanted to get this figured out before i run into the same situation with this car.

 

[dkswim]

if you need pics of what to do i can find some. i have some on my other camera. i posted up a how to of sorts in some thread i cant find it now.

 

[GhostMercury]

i would like to make mine higher as well. the highest setting just doesn't shine to far.

 

[dkswim]

i guess ill try and make a how to of this over the weekend.

 

[GhostMercury]

sounds good, thanks man

 

[dkswim]

here are the pics i have.

here is the link to how to. http://www.mazdas247.com/forum/showthread.php?p=3936773#post3936773