(I posted this on the R3 Forum but wanted to also share it here)
As I had posted a few days ago, I noticed that one of my headlights was pointing more up and the other more down. I confirmed that I was not alone when I looked at about 6 other new Rockets over the past few weeks, including some new Rockets that were at a Triumph Factory Demo show at a local dealer yesterday.
I had brought this observation to the R3 board members, and to the Triumph factory rep, because I was curious if (1) they were built this way for some different reason, or (2) was it perhaps just a bad batch of brackets that Quality Control missed. I just did not see the logic in having one headlight pointing down and one pointing up when both headlights are mounted to a flat bar that prevents independent vertical movement. They are designed to move up and down together. It seems to me that two headlights whether mounted a few inches or a few feet apart (autos) should be parallel. This is just basic logic.
I asked the Triumph representative about it and his first response was that "yes, they move up and down independently of one another". I told him that the headlights move independently only in the left/right plane, but during up and down adjustments they only move together. I asked him to look at the demo Rockets he had brought and sure enough he confirmed with me that all of them were out of alignment, and that the headlights move up and down together, not independently up and down. He sort of scratched his head and said "I don't know why, but you are right". I am not blaming the Triumph representative for his lack of knowledge or anything because he is not responsible for research, design, or production. If anything he learned something to take back to corporate.
This has not only been a visual concern of mine, but also a practical concern since at night I had one light pointing more on the pavement and one pointing more up at oncoming cars (on low beam). On high beam, one light was up in the trees. To say the least, this is a dangerous set up because of the lack of coverage on the road. So, I decided to disassemble my headlights today and investigate my hunch that this phenomenon was not by design.
Well fellow Rocketeers, as the following pictures show, and as I suspected all along, the horizontal mounting bracket was not only bent but it also had a slight twist in it. Since both headlight buckets and lenses are identical, they should mount parallel on a flat bracket and provide double lighting on the same plane for low and high beam. With a bent and twisted bracket, I found my answer. All I can surmise is that there was a bad batch of brackets being sold to Triumph (or fabricated at Triumph) and no one caught this. I see no other reason to assume that this was a planned design feature. Although the pictures are in one dimension, trust me, there was enough of a bend and twist to throw the headlights out of parallel.
I straightened the bracket in my bench vise, got it nice and flat, one side congruent to the other, and test fit it several times, having to repeatedly bend it slightly until the headlights threw an acceptable pattern on the garage wall. I took the bike for a test ride out on a very dark stretch of road here in the Arizona desert tonight and I am now more than impressed with the light coverage on the road with both the low and high beams. The difference is amazing.
If anyone is in doubt about this or has any information to substantiate that the headlights were designed to be mounted with "one hung low, and one hung high", please share the info.
EDIT: Do not try to adjust your headlights vertically by pushing one up and the other down. All you will do is bend the metal tab on the side of the headlight bucket and/or distort the shape of the bucket. Even after doing this, you will not have a parallel set of lights. You will have a bent set of buckets on a bent factory bracket. The bracket is extremely strong and will not bend if you push on the lights. I did not do this in spite of the advice of some. I preferred to dig deeper to find the answer and solution.
[ This message was edited by: snayper on 2005-10-31 08:12 ]
