Vocal Voices

My car is going in for MOT on Saturday. It's sitting in a garage in Brussels and I'll bring it over on Saturday morning.

However when the French dealer checked it over, they found that the whole backing bracket assembly for the near side headlight was broken. The outer locking clip is gone and the middle adjusting bracket was sheared just off the light itself.

I drilled and epoxied the bottom of the bracket and fibre glassed over the top and round onto the epoxy on Saturday. However I now have a near side dip which is quite a bit lower than my off side. I'm not sure what they do about that. If I have to I can go all macho and force the thing back into place, running the risk of breaking it off again, however if they are not worried about the lights being a bit low, then I'm not going to bother.

I'm not that amused that the only adjusters on the lights are for the main beams... You can adjust the whole assembly but you have to slacken the retaining bracket and slide the light backwards and pinch it up again. Bit 1970's for my non mechanical life today.

Any ideas?

[upate]

Just looked at a light on ebay and there seems to be a second adjuster. Couldn't see it in the garage. I'll check it out tomorrow and update if it does the job.... I might just buy another light unit as one is on ebay for £18 but it looked like you had to take the whole lower bumper off to replace it....

Suff, as you have probably realised the dip has to be in limits, it also has to be adjustable. The guy I used for MOTs never failed anything if he could adjust it back to within limits, but seized adjusters would lead to a fail.

I think that I would go with a SH unit rather than a bodge job with epoxy.

Tells you all about it here Suff

http://www.driving-test-success.com/car ... assing.htm

It doesn't date the article though………..

Thanks Molly.

The position, size and output of the headlights must match,

I was worried about that. Ah well, I'll have to do the work to get them aligned then. Which means Friday night.

The security bit is no issue at all. You would need a fairly large lever to move the thing the bracket is now roughly 4 times stronger than it was before it was broken.... I don't believe in fragile repairs, too long in the Army for that..

They have to left dip of course.

Uk car ped. I only use it over here.

Lights are adjusted so fingers crossed for tomorrow. I'll be taking my toolkit and overalls just in case there is something I can do that needs to be done.

MOT passed now. Failed initially with both front wiper blades half stripped off. My 807 has directed washer jets which come from the wiper arm. Nobody holds them in stock, not even the dealers. I had to buy a set of 26" generic blades from Halfords and take the blades out and feed them into my original arms.

However it's done. Got up at 05:30 and arrived back here at 21:50. Car is now totally back on the road. Had to do the tax on my mobile because I forgot to bring my netbook with me...DOH...

So much for French pre control technique verification. Apparently if the headlights are showing the beam in the right place, even if they are half loose, they pass in France and the CT is a two year test not one....

Well done. That must be a relief to be legal again though I don`t know if you can use a UK car indefinitely in any EEC country. I thought you might have altered the dip for France, I get flashed at if they dip the wrong way..

Good work Suff. I guess that if the beams dip to the right place there is no need for the tester to look at the adjusters.

Ped, you can buy stick on deflector lenses to make the dip angle neutral - perfectly legal and safe. I sometimes forgot to remove them when returning from holiday and never had a problem with them either side of the Channel.