My headlights are unusable-- Please Help!

Hello,

I have a 06 Mazda 5. The car works fine in every regard except for the headlights. The brights work perfect and light up the road well, but the low beams are unusable. Very dim, and they seem to be too far down to the ground. What I first did is replace the crappy old bulbs with some Philips Racingvision H7 bulbs. Supposedly they are top of the line bulbs. However, the low beams are still unusable.

I then tried to align the beams. They looks very misaligned and too far down to the ground. I saw 2 Philips screws and moved them with my socket ratchet wrench, but the headlights did not change in any way. Like, they moved, but nothing happened. I hope they aren't stripped, I have no idea. I don't know what to do at this point, which is why I've posted this thread.

One other thing I should add is that I installed the right bulb fine, and the clip went on all the way. However, the left bulb's clip didn't seem to go on all the way. The bottom went on all the way, but the top did not. It still seemed secure in the housing, though, and the clip held in.

Thanks for the help, and look forward to solving this problem.
 
There should be two adjusters per beam- one for horizontal alignment and one for vertical. Make sure you found all of them!
 
There should be two adjusters per beam- one for horizontal alignment and one for vertical. Make sure you found all of them!

I actually took it to my local Mazda dealership and they found that I had installed the bulbs incorrectly. They fixed the clips and aligned the bulbs for me for a cheap price. Now they are great! Thanks anyway!
 
Yeah. I want to beat the ever loving piss out of the Mazda engineer that made those GD headlight clips.
 
Not just Mazda vehicles have those type of clips, many Toyota and Nissan vehicles use the same type of clips....
 
Not just Mazda vehicles have those type of clips, many Toyota and Nissan vehicles use the same type of clips....

My experience is that they are only similar. The geometry on the Mazda 5 ones are such that they don't release the bulb easily and it's a bizarre lesson in rotating a three dimension body and then getting the clip back in the right spot.

On Hondas/Toyotas it's 100 times easier.
 
Seems like you*ve already fixed it, but likely the issue was not having the little notch on the H7 lamp base line up with the same notch on the projector. It tends to fall out of place while you*re wrestling with satan*s headlamp retention clips.

FWIW I*ve had the best luck with those clips by getting everything in position, then doing one fast/hard push forward and up. Every time I*ve tried wrestling with them it*s been a s*** show. When I started doing the fast movement it works nearly every time.
 
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