|
I've had my '06 Tiger for just past a year now, but haven't had too many occasions to ride after dark. When I have, I noticed that the headlights were pathetic in illuminating the roadway effectively. Kudos to the factory and dealer for a job well ignored. For a good Memorial Day exercise, I decided to dig into the cockpit and align the headlights.
Getting the cockpit off and gaining access to the headlight assembly is easy enough. Removing the windscreen, the two turn-signal trim pieces, and four bolts and the Tiger's little fairing breaks away easily. The next issue though, entailed two hours of trail and error to figure out how the two headlights should be positioned.
The first thing I noticed was that both headlights have split beams. That is, there are two primary beams off each lamp that form a "V" with an angle of roughly 20 degrees. This had me scratching my head while I played around with the horizontal adjustment. After a bit of adjusting, when I had everything aligned to give good coverage, I found my high beams were illuminating the hedges, but not the roadway.
So I readjusted the headlights using the high-beams as my guide, then tweaked the low-beams to dial in the best coverage. This, in my opinion, is the key to aligning the headlights if your alignment is off in the weeds.
The way my low-beam coverage is now formed is very interesting...
The "V" formed by each headlight overlaps. The right leg of the V from the left lamp illuminates the right hand side of the lane in front of the bike. The right lamp works the same, but in reverse, with the left leg of the V-beam illuminating the left side of the lane in front of the bike. The left leg of the V from the left lamp illuminates the roadway to the left of the bike, outside the lane, with the right leg of the V from the right lamp doing the same for other side.
It's a little confusing. The best way to think of it is like a VW logo, with the lamps at the bottom of the W and the center beams overlapping to make the V.
By aligning the headlamps in this manner, with the center portion of the beams overlapping, I was able to get good broad illumination of the roadway, and the high-beam beams are spot-on for excellent coverage down the road.
I'd be interested to know if anyone has found a different way to align their headlights that gives good illumination for both low and high beams.
[ This message was edited by: BigRieg on 2007-05-29 01:37 ]
|
