Headlight Alignment

Lowell Brown recently replaced his headlights with some NOS ones as the old ones were suffering from a loss of the mirror plating on the inside.

He stopped by today to have a large enough place to align them.  The owner's manual has the basic dimensions, 71 cm from the ground and 134 cm apart.  We measured 133 cm and used that number.  Since this is a single headlight car, you only aim using the low beam setting.  These Carrello headlights have the typical low beam pattern for older quartz iodine ones.  To the left of center, the beam is cut off on a level line.  To the right, the beam angles up to give more light directly ahead and to the edge of the road where it won't shine on oncoming driver's eyes.  Of course this is for left hand drive cars.  Right hand ones require headlights that have the opposite pattern.

To aim these requires finding the straight ahead level point for the center of each headlight.  We had the car back about 15 feet from a large piece of cardboard.  Then we drew lines in center of the front and rear windshields.  Looking through from the back allowed us to mark the cardboard at the centerline of the car.  From there, we measured out 1/2 of the distance between the headlights in each direction.  Coming up from the ground 71 cm on each line gave us the center point for aiming.

Then it was a simple task to adjust each screw until the angle between the flat line on the left and upward sloping line on the right was exactly centered on the mark.  Here you can see the mark at that angle.

The camera pictures actually blended the light in a more even pattern.  It's really clear to see where the angle occurs in these pictures.