High beam setting on headlights all wacky

[doctormap]

It was a foggy morning a couple days ago, so I checked the headlights to see how they are aimed. The low beam checks out great, they converge about a hundred yards out in a nice patch of light. However, when switching to high beams, the left one goes left and up in the air, and the right one seems to be unchanged, so as a result, the high beam setting is pretty much useless. We live out in the country, so there are times when the high beam setting can be needed to see farther down the highway. But, in the past I haven't used it because the high beam setting actually seemed to make the seeing worse, rather than better.

Is this something that is expected, usual, with this car? Or should the headlights be replaced? Would new lights be expected to work better than this?

[Heuer]

The headlights on the E-Type, especially the S2, are reasonable although probably not up to the high speed capabilities of the car. Are the ones on your car sealed beam or removable bulb style? You could fit a pair of Cibie headlamp with Osram Night Breaker Plus or Philips X-treme Vision + 100% bulbs which is about as good as it gets.

There is also a fairly simple conversion you can do which uses relays and should give you lighting equivalent to a modern car. See here: viewtopic.php?t=4919

[christopher storey]

If your dip beam configuration is good, but the light is scattering upwards ( on the left hand unit ) on main beam, then either the glass or reflector is damaged in the case of a pre-focused light, sealed beam, or if it is a detachable bulb type, there is something wrong with the bulb or its holder. I have to say that convergence of the dipped beams 100 yards forward sounds an awful long way to me - I would have thought the two light fields should start to overlap perhaps 30 yards ahead

[David Oslo]

I should know this stuff off by heart, homologation of new vehicles is one of the things I did for about 20 years, but I changed industries 5 years ago, and it's amazing what dissappears from the old hard disc.

Anyhow, point 1 is to read up on the relevant US (FMVSS) or EU (UN) specs, as they differ slightly on lighting. Easy enough to find online. In there you will find pretty simplistic rules for how to measure the headlamp aim, all written more or less the same way as when they wrote the first rulebook in the late '50s and early '60s.

But just to get you on the right track, the low / high beams should not converge. They should point parallel forwards, and more or less parallel with the car, however in fact they are ever so slightly biased out of the way of oncoming traffic (hence in EU there is two directions of lamps).

Rule of thumb for a garage setup is to wheel the car at 90 degrees to your favourite wall, push it in close to the wall and transfer with tape measure and spirit level the center of the light unit (it has centre markings for this) onto the wall (or onto a piece of A3 paper on the wall). Double check the side to side measurement just for good measure. Then push the car backwards (it's 90 degrees to the wall, so the lightbeam should stay pretty much on the paper) until the lamps are 25' (7,6m) from the wall. At night, and with decent lamp units, you should clearly see a horizontal portion of white (with dark above it) and a knee or elbow going upwards (away from the oncoming traffic). Roughly (we're talking DIY here) the bend point from horizontal to slightly upwards should be slightly off the original centre points made (towards outside of road), and similarly they should be slightly lower than the centre.

What you are checking here is (a) that the beams are parallel (e.g. still landing on same centre when rolled back 25') (b) that the beams are biased slightly away from the centre of the road (oncoming traffic) (c) biased slightly downwards (ref. oncoming traffic). The bias amount downwards is minimum 1.5" at 25' (which equates to 0.5%). Sit in the car during this check, in order to see that the added mass doesn't upset the aim.

May be difficult to understand what I'm describing, but it should become clear when standing with wall and car, pen and paper.

Once you've got the low beams right, using the guide above and following the knee & horizontal portion of the light beam, then the high-beams are automatically correct. Unless the bulb is completely stuffed.

Update: For UK this will help explain stuff, from the MOT handbook, http://www.motuk.co.uk/manual_180.htm

[doctormap]

Yeah, that's what I thought. It is not only not supposed to be like that, but dangerous to not have the high beam setting available, especially for high speed highway driving. I am pretty sure these are sealed beam lights, but I will have to check this out.

Most likely solution here is to replace both bulbs with new ones, and I am leaning toward the Philips headlamps.

Thanks so much for the kind replies, I appreciate it.

[doctormap]

Well, I did come up with a sort of a solution to my headlight problem. I did replace the headlights with new ones. The new bulbs did exactly the same thing as the old ones. When I got the low beam (dipped) adjusted right, the high beam setting was, again, all wacky. The left light went high and left and the right one went low and right.

After playing around with the aim for a couple weeks I finally hit on a sort of solution. I ended up aiming the left light lower and to the right, thus shining down the right side of the road about 100ft. in front of the car, so the high beam went straight down the road about 1/8 mile. The right side I aimed (low beam) down the road about 1/8 mile, which then put the high beam about 100ft. in front of the car, and to the right side of the road.

It sounds kinda goofy, but it works! So, basically, what I ended up with was high beam is pretty much the same as low beam but a bit brighter, and I don't get cars coming the other way flashing their high beams at me.