Reasons When Car Headlight alignment Become Misaligned?

Proper headlight alignment is crucial for one’s safety on the road. But sometimes, unfortunately, car headlights get misaligned anonymously by themselves, which should not happen though. Once they have been properly aligned by a reliable company like Rathdowney Quick Fit in their tyre centre, they should stay the same way until either the car owner or the repair services providing shop professionals decide to intervene. But likely, like too many other things that are considered not to need to happen, but do occur from time to time, headlights misalignment is one of them.

Besides headlight alignment, another significant thing to consider is the worn-out bulbs. The bulbs present both at the front and back have filaments, which tend to expand over the course of their lives. When such a case happened, they no longer stay in the same ideal position in which they were initially fitted. And also, their ideal focal point determined for proper light distribution gets disturbed from the original headlight configuration. Both these things majorly contribute to road accidents, especially while driving at night.

Major Cases When Headlights Become Misaligned

Furthermore, the following are some of the cases when headlight alignment gets disturbed and you need to replace the worn-out bulbs or repair the alignment as soon as possible.

1. When something in headlights gets broken

There are various internal components attached inside the housing of the headlights, all those solely by means of adjustment screws held at delicate joint though. And because nowadays most of those components are made up of plastic, so over time they become brittle and subsequently develop a slight tendency to break under even slight pressure, such as jolts and vibrations of irregular roads that your car face while driving. Fluttering headlights are the most obvious sign of such broken headlights case.

2. When Lens get damaged

The problems relating to lenses usually occur in older headlights, especially those which contain some diffusion discs uniquely made of grooved glass. Having said that those diffusion discs themselves used to play a crucial role in equal light distribution. But unfortunately, they used to get cracked or get multiple scratches, dazzling the sight of road fellows from improper light distribution.

However, nowadays newer and clearer lenses tend to fit in the headlamps, so that the light exposed through them gets diffused in different directions. Similar to diffusion discs though, these plastic lenses also become opaque over time and cause light dazzling in others’ eyes.

3. When headlight alignment is impaired

Mostly the beams of headlights are merely supposed to move down and up whenever the driver plainly operates either a wheel on the dashboard or a manual dial. Having such automated systems in the car lamps, such as those present in the Xenon lamps, the beams usually tend to shift down due to extra weight added to the vehicle. And this most commonly occurs unfortunately when the leveling systems of your headlight alignment take on a life on their own.

However, in all such cases, having a different setting or some manual adjustment may help you out, but remember these are not permanent solutions though, and they somehow mean a compromise in the quality of lighting. So, always be very careful

4. When suddenly an accident lowers down your car settings

Over time, drivers usually tend to change their car’s manual headlights leveling systems, especially when they encounter some accident. That is because they get confused while operating the adjustment dial from the instrument lighting panel to have maximum brightness control. But in some other cases, the settings get inadvertently changed during the process of cleaning the dashboard. However, whatever the main reason may be, such an unintentional adjustment can greatly shorten the range of your low beam headlights.