NCT and headlight adjustment

peasant

Two years ago my car failed the NCT on headlight adjustment (and headlight adjustment only) even though I had the car serviced (and lights adjusted) only a few weeks earlier.

So I got them adjusted again and the fella said ...they're fine, but I'll turn them down a bit ...and I passed the re-test.

Come the dark evenings and I noticed that I couldn't see a thing. So I parked the car in front of a wall and adjusted the lamps myself, good and high, back to perfect illumination and no complaints from oncoming traffic.

Today ...two years later, I went for the NCT again with my DIY-adjusted lights, prepared to fail on lights ....and I passed.

Maybe they had fulfilled their quota for retests already?


Or am I just being cynical?



BTW ...In Germany there now are two companies that do the equivalent of the NCT .
Due to competition you don't fail on misaligned headlights anymore ...they adjust them for you ...for free !!!

Darragh29

peasant wrote:

Two years ago my car failed the NCT on headlight adjustment (and headlight adjustment only) even though I had the car serviced (and lights adjusted) only a few weeks earlier.

So I got them adjusted again and the fella said ...they're fine, but I'll turn them down a bit ...and I passed the re-test.

Come the dark evenings and I noticed that I couldn't see a thing. So I parked the car in front of a wall and adjusted the lamps myself, good and high, back to perfect illumination and no complaints from oncoming traffic.

Today ...two years later, I went for the NCT again with my DIY-adjusted lights, prepared to fail on lights ....and I passed.

Maybe they had fulfilled their quota for retests already?


Or am I just being cynical?



BTW ...In Germany there now are two companies that do the equivalent of the NCT .
Due to competition you don't fail on misaligned headlights anymore ...they adjust them for you ...for free !!!

Well we guarantee the NCT for every customer if we pre-test, we bring the car for the NCT on behalf of the customer and we never have a problem. We never have to do retests, but we have the same equipment as the NCT so I suppose we have an advantage. I don't agree with the retest quota theory, if they don't have a fail-refusal item, they can't fail the car, its as simple as that imo.

Gerry

Well, if I'm reading this correctly, it failed when you had a garage adjust the headlights. It passed when you adjusted them yourself.
If I want to be really sure, I go to a garage that uses the same machine as the nct. I had a go at adjusting them myself before the last nct, I had set the height correctly as follows:
Drive car right up to a wall, with the front square to the wall. Note where the hot spot of the beams is on the wall. Make sure the lights are level with each other.
Reverse back about 20 feet. Adjust the height until the beams are about 18 inches below where they were with the car right up to the wall.
This worked ok for me in the nct, but I didn't pay enough attention to the horizontal aim, so one headlight failed on that.

peasant

Gerry wrote:

Well, if I'm reading this correctly, it failed when you had a garage adjust the headlights. It passed when you adjusted them yourself.

It's actually worse than that ...

The last time, after it passed, the lights were adjusted so poorly that I couldn't see a fecking thing
They were set correctly (by a garage) when I failed and hat to be misaligned on purpose (by a different garage) to pass the re-test.

Logically they should have been failed again this time (as I had re-set them again myself for good vision) but they were fine.

Go figure ...