Useful Headlamp/Headlight and Front Foglight/Foglamp beam aim setting guide

[VolvoSaab]

This is how I did it; and the best part of all of this is my method is it is completely universally applicable.

 

Parked my car about 3 meters away from a plain smooth [unpatterned] wall. The beam pattern can be best seen on such a surface.

 

Got my electric screwdriver. Turned the each headlamp aim screw, until it stopped at extreme left, extreme right, extreme down and extreme up.

 

Made marks on the wall at each of the 4 points; left right down and up and joined them up to make a cross symbol.

 

Then I simply ensured that the 10° 'kick up' and the 180° horizontal part (\_) where they met; i.e. literally where the horizontal line started to move upwards, or where the 10° upwards beam and the part of the horizontal met, was for both headlamps/headlights exactly where the intersection of both the horizontal and vertical lines was.

 

So the vertical height of the beam sat exactly on the horizontal line part of the cross and the lateral part of the beam \_ sat literally on the cross axes.

 

Thus to me, using my method, logically the beam was not pointing upwards straight in drivers faces and illuminating the sky and none of the road in front, and nor was pointing immediately downwards in front of the car illuminating  a 1 meter² portion of the road and nothing else; Same goes for lateral beam vision aiming; neither illuminating all of the nearside and none of the offside and neither all the offside and none of the nearside. 

 

For front foglights/lamps it was/is a similar procedure; except [a] its a completely flat 180° horizontal beam and [b] there's no lateral aim facility for front fog lamps/lights. So using my screwdriver I kept turning the beam aiming screw until the beam was at its lowest and then the opposite way until it was at its highest. Drew horizontal lines at both extremes. Worked out what was the halfway position between the two lines and set the aim at that point.

 

The above was just how I performed headlamp/light and Front foglight/lamp aim.

 

If you have a better method, please feel free to air your method!

 

p.s. electric screwdriver just makes the process/procedure quicker and especially in terms of lateral aim, much easier to see.

 

[I'm sorry I didn't take any photographs ]

 

p.s just like a camera lens can be focused, its a pity projector headlamps/lights foglamps/lights don't have this facility and instead they are just fixed focused. I've seen cars with absolutely razor sharp beam patterns and others with really out of focus/blurry beam patterns. If they  were like a camera one could simply adjust the focus of the lens and it would be job done. Both types of cars observed have been new/fairly new and old as well.