Sunday, November 01, 2009 - 07:36 am, by: Raj Somarouthu(Edinlexusv8)
Folks, I have to say I had a pretty awful week when it came to the work done on my soarer. I had a terrible time getting my headlights fixed. Here it goes ....
I bought a set of (ridiculously expensive) chrome projector headlights from AUS 4 months ago. The reason being my original Toyota headlights are not very clear and looks old and I also choose not to bake my headlights in the oven. Wanted to have an upgraded look on the car too. Thought these headlights from US are relatively cheap compared to the Aussie ones (options australia) I preferred the aussie ones as I heard that the US ones would not pass MOT. Two things made me feel good after the headlights arrived from AUS. The packaging on the boxes says RHD, car looks modern from outside (as in most new cars have clear plastic/glass with see through projector lamp units), passed MOT straight away (2 days later) with out any problem. All the hell started to come after me from here!
Every time I go out onto the streets during the night time I noticed pretty much everybody is flashing their high beam at me. I initially thought the road are awful anyway so it is from the bumps. But later I realized that it is because of my headlights as I am unable to see much on the roads esp when it is dark with no street lights. I adjusted the beams using the adjusters as much as I could but still the projected light from the headlights is only falling on the walls of the building beside the road but not on the road itself. It was not that awful the last couple of months.
But now it is getting dark quite early @ 5:00 - 5:30pm. The last couple of days I could not see a thing on the road while driving back from work on the motorway in the evening. All I can see is the white flourascent lane divider and the back light on the cars. Have to say it has been a scary experience! :crazy:
So I went down to a garage today and asked them to do an MOT check on the driver side headlight. Well as expected the headlight beam is way off the limit with the beam pointing to the top away from the centre of the car (straight into the oncoming cars). The guy at the garage said the car should not have passed MOT with these headlamps. After doing some adjustments found out that the lamps are faulty (I always feared that this would happen) and cannot be used and not fit for the purpose! mgsign:
As I know the owner of this garage for a few years, he agreed upon my idea of disassembling the headlamps and fixing the projector lens and this is how all the work went!
Jim is the guy in the pic. Very helpful guy! Never says no to any job! We used a head gun to melt the silicon. Would recommend anybody to use this for disassembling the lamps.
Sunday, November 01, 2009 - 09:04 pm, by: Raj Somarouthu(Edinlexusv8)
Hell James, it has been a real pain to get this done. If you look at the last but 4th pic above, you can see a black screw that pivots this silver lens to the lamp unit. This screw is swapped from top left corner to the bottom right corner as in last but 3rd pic. This effectively solved the problem.
To be honest the make of these headlights is not great esp all the screws including the adjusters go into a plastic threading case and if you screw and unscrew a few times the plastic threading would not last. I might have preferred a metal threading in a a plastic unit.