Extra Light, part III

TL;DR Pimpin' ain't easy
Read part I  and part II for the full story.

Even I think that a third post about those additional lights is a bit much. Yet again, the time spent 'researching' and fiddling with the adjustment make it worth my time writing it down. This whole blog could have been a collection of Post-It notes in Google Keep, all bullet points, sketches and figures.

Anywho, as pleased as I was to transform my Seven into a light ball, it was too much and a plain nuisance to others if we're honest. Flooding the scenery up to the roof of houses with pissy yellow light wouldn't bring anything useful in actual fog either. The fact that the white drive beams were aiming too high was not as problematic, but the goal was for them to fill the black void left when the low beams turn off as the high beams are activated.

I got a first check on the wall of the parking lot at work at the end of the day, with evidence recorded by the dashcam for later analysis and comparison. That looked ok overall, with the center of the beams roughly where the headlights' lows aim.

What I might not have described yet is how similar the LPW530 reflectors are to the NS2270 headlights, with the LED chips sitting on an horizontal partition wall, projecting through a reflector on either side; each with a different pattern. On the headlights, we have the low beam on the above the  high beam. The combined PIAAs have the yellow fogs on the bottom and drive light on top.

There is a well defined vertical cut-off/separation between the two. Horizontally, it gets very interesting : the fogs project to wide isolated yellow lobes (each), with the narrower white sitting in the center.

That makes for multiple ways of setting off covering the road. With a pair you could project straight ahead to merge the beams; toe-out so much that you get 4 beams; or, as I did, merge the center lobes and get 3 beams to provide a stronger illumination on the road with a good coverage of the sides too.

It didn't take long to see that even the fogs were blinding oncoming traffic. Road signs reflections were quite aggressive too. Video showed the illumination lobes better than the naked eye, highlighting that the right-hand unit could be toed-out a bit further.

I went back to the parking lot late in the evening with a spanner, my allen wrenches and beanie for a better adjustment. The beanie is used to cover one light when adjusting the other. That confirmed that the reference central lobe came from the left-hand lamp, and the right-hand one was to be adjusted slightly. So I did. It also seems that more toe-out would/could help with reflections from the road signs.

The white drive beams, more focused, remain parallel as the adjustment were really minute. We're talking angles that are fractions of a degree.

Vertically, I did follow the instructions manual and got the center of the beam an appropriate height below the height of the center of the lenses. It says 0.5% or 1.5cm at 3 meters. I got a dedicated video of that too, where I light up each light in sequence then in combination.

Luckily, weather offered me fog and mist that night, so I could go to a dark empty street and test everything in actual conditions. That looked too high still, with pictures from the side showing the well defined vertical limits of each beam, with the yellow ones clearly raising with distance.

After that I got deeper in the rabbit hole of fog lights adjustment, and the common advice is that 25 feet (7.5m) away, the top of the light should be about 4 inch (10cm) below the center of the lens. Videos that demonstrate it made a lot of sense too.

So we got back to the underground parking lot once again, no tools required for the vertical adjustment. As I forgot to bring a beanie or cap, I got the balaclava from the boot. I got the car 8-ish steps from the wall and aimed the top of the fogs to the middle of the first concrete block. With such an angle, the shiny finish of the ground became a real issue. Checking from afar, I wouldn't blind anyone anymore.

Driving back home, we though it would be good to test in actual mist in an open parking lot nearby. We were offered far better than what we planned with a proper dense fog up the hill. As usual, I couldn't see sh*t with the headlights as you're sitting so low that you have to see through the thin slice of well illuminated fog; but we also saw that the new lights were now really too low to be useful. I turned right in a rather dark cul-de-sac, found a straight flat and level portion of tarmac and stopped the car right in the middle of the road.

I was finally in the best conditions for "the" proper adjustment : at night, in misty fog, with the misses at the wheel to flick switches and also act as a mass simulator (as they say in the space industry). Yellows now cover enough that you could drive with them instead of the lows while keeping the top of the beam below an horizontal line, and the whites complement the highs as planned from the beginning.

All that was left to do was to route the command harness properly. It was done on the sunny Sunday Feb 1st. The wiring was long enough no to need any of the 3 provided harness extensions. As usual when pushing a cable through the main tunnel grommet, the car had to be lifted so I could lie beneath.

Watch them in action in the video below. Or don't, I'm not your boss.