If you experience you can’t see as well at night, or you experience you’re lighting too low, or too high, in all these cases, there’s only one component of your car to take responsibility – your headlights, also often known as high beams. Although this adjustment may appear easy thanks to the thumbwheel on your dashboard, a complete adjustment is much more technical than this simple manipulation, and in this article, we are going to find out how to adjust the headlights of your Ford Ranger? To do this, first we will find out why you need to adjust your high beams, and secondly how to adjust the headlights of your Ford Ranger.

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Why adjust the headlights of your Ford Ranger?

So let’s start our article with the benefit of adjusting the headlights of your Ford Ranger. For the majority of us, our headlights are adjusted sufficiently, and they seem to light up enough through the night. However this is not always the circumstance and looking at this setting, either because the headlights on your Ford Ranger are not bright enough, or because you have the impression that they are too weak is a great idea .

Adjusting the high beams of your Ford Ranger for safety

To begin with, the headlight adjustment of a Ford Ranger must be done for a basic security reason. Regardless it’s for you, or for the other users you come across during your night trips. In actual fact, if you don’t see enough, the risk is to fail to see an obstacle driving, or to predict a curve badly. Alternatively, if your headlights are too strong, even if you are expected to switch to low beam lights when you cross a car, the time needed to make this change will most of the time expose the driver in front of you to the headlight beam of your Ford Ranger . It is therefore necessary for others as well as for you to have an optimal adjustment of your headlights.

Adjusting the headlights of a Ford Ranger for legal reasons

Furthermore to security, there is a law that supervises the power, the adjustment of motor vehicle headlights (articles R313-2 of the Highway Code), here is what it suggests: have between 2 and 4 headlights that illuminate at minimum 100 meters. Another legislation supervises their use, the European one (directive 76/756/EEC), which stipulates that there is no maximum height for the adjustment of the headlights, but that the maximum width of the beam must be matching to that of the dipped headlights and that the maximum luminosity must be 225, 000 cd.

How to adjust the headlights of a Ford Ranger?

We will now move on to the part that concerns you the most in this article, how to adjust the headlights of his Ford Ranger? This adjustment may appear a bit difficult, but by simply following the recommendations you should have the ability to perform it without too much issue.

Preparations to adjust the headlights of a Ford Ranger

To begin with, you’ll need to prepare your car to adjust your high beams in good conditions, here are the preparations to put in place:

  • Place your car on a surface in front of a white wall for example, about 4 or 5 meters from the wall.
  • Verify your tire pressure carefully.
  • Verify that the height adjustment knob for the lights is set to 0
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  • Try doing that with half a full tank.
  • Take out all needless weight from the car, only one person should be in the driver’s seat.

The headlight adjustment of his Ford Ranger

Once your vehicle is in position, you will turn on your dipped beam and make a cross-shaped mark (one horizontal and one vertical section) in the middle of the beam that will be projected on the wall. Verify with a level that both parts of the cross are horizontal. Then back your car up to a distance of between 7 and 10 metres. For the rest of the procedure here are the steps to stick to:

  • Open your hood, locate the screws for horizontal and vertical modification of the headlights of your Ford Ranger (they are in general designated, and those on top must modify the verticality and the one on the side controls the horizontality of the adjustment).
  • Use a cloth or another thing to hide the projector on which you are not making the modification.
  • Using the screws to make the horizontal modification, you should have the most intense component of the beam which should be a little to the right of the vertical line marked on the wall
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  • With regard to vertical modification, you will have to use the screw to try to position the upper end of the beam at the level of the horizontal marking on the wall, or slightly down below.
  • Once finished, verify that the headlights setting of your Ford Ranger is logical, do not hesitate to verify it after you have driven it, sometimes it may move.

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If you want to adjust the fog lights on your Ford Ranger, please read our article on this subject matter.

If you need more guides on the Ford Ranger, go to our Ford Ranger category.