Post
Sun Sep 29, 2013 8:18 pm
Two adjusters for each light - eight in total. They're fairly obvious if you look at the back of the lights.
If you have/had the headlamp aiming knob near the driver's right knee, the up/down adjusters on the dipped beams will be different from the others, and are likely to be the only ones that aren't seized solid, unless they've all been kept well covered in copper grease over the years.
I've had mixed success in unseizing them - you can usually free them up and clean up the steel threads, but you'll often find that the thread in the plastic nuts has stripped.
New ones are available from BMW at not too high a price, but it mounts up if you change all of them.
If you have the remotely adjustable dipped beams, the hydraulic mechanism will almost certainly have failed beyond repair, and they will have settled in their default position, which is too low to keep the MOT test man happy. There is a fine adjustment available by turning the outer body of the cylinders, but the range of this adjustment is not normally enough to bring the lights high enough. Fortunately, there is a coarse adjustment in the form of the steel threaded rod that projects from the front of the cylinders to the headlamps, and if this is screwed out two or three turns, the correct aim will be within the range of the fine adjuster.
If you wish to retain remote adjusters, the electric adjusters from an E34 can be adapted to fit fairly easily.
Each of the adjusters fits into a plastic cup where they connect to the headlamp rim, and it's usual to find these in need of renewal as well.
. Is there a way of adjusting these manually. I have searched the forum but may have only skim read each relevant topic, after being overly eager to get these sorted.
