Headlight Refurbishment

F

Felix

Member
 Kent
Hi

I'm starting working tidying up my aged zed, leading up to a probable full respray and wheel refurb in March/April ready for its 10th summer with me.

My headlights are suffering from the expected clouding and I've been Googling the refurb kits/polishes, but there are hundreds of them!

Is there an accepted wisdom on which products/processes work (a) best and (b) easiest - I'm new to this detailing game and don't want to make things worse, preferring a 9/10 easy result rather than the quest for showroom perfection.

Thanks!
 
First of all try machine polishing with some cutting compound first, you get great results. If things are really bad, wet sand them then machine polish. Loads of guides on youtube
 
Whatever you do ideally you want to apply some kind of UV sealant to it afterwards. The polishing/wetsanding processes remove the factory coating from the polycarbonate so they will yellow much more quickly.
 
http://drheadlightlondon.wix.com/drheadlight#!location/c3fg
try these guys if you dont fancy doing the job yourself someone on the forum used them and said they were great try using the search and see if you can find his thread he put picks up aswell,
i will be using them soon about £80 ,i was going to do mine but after you have bought the stuff to do it and the time it would take i thought better of it
GT :thumbsup:
 
I've now had a nose a few of the youtube videos and think I'm going to brave it and have a go myself. I see that a few of the kits on Amazon etc seem to include the UV sealants too. I have time on my hands at the moment (but little income!), so it's looking like a kit and elbow grease, pending an eBay purchase of a machine polisher. I'll take some before and after photos and will one day work out how to post them.

Thanks for the advice guys, it's given me a bit more confidence to tackle the task!
 
I know this will be disappointing if you are intent on using man-gadgets and weirdly named snake oil polish but I followed a forum tip and used standard toothpaste on a pad. Some quite nasty clouding simply disappeared after a bit of elbow grease and 50p of cheap paste, a mint result :exitright:

Left side after cleaning - Right side before

 
Ewazix said:
I know this will be disappointing if you are intent on using man-gadgets and weirdly named snake oil polish but I followed a forum tip and used standard toothpaste on a pad. Some quite nasty clouding simply disappeared after a bit of elbow grease and 50p of cheap paste, a mint result :exitright:

Left side after cleaning - Right side before

Click to expand...

Wow! I've used toothpaste on the inside of a diving mask to prevent fogging up underwater, but I never realised that it was so versatile. Got to be worth a go before spending money.
 
Mangozac said:
For the record I tried toothpaste on mine and it did absolutely nothing.
Click to expand...

Now I'm back to being fully confused again. Perhaps it needs toothpaste with a stripe or extra whitening?????
 
Toothpaste worked well for me too. Some brands must be better than others!

Sent from my GT-P6810 using Tapatalk
 
NeilP said:
From 2 of my favourite Aussies...

[youtube]Cy_WF5Iei_I[/youtube]
Click to expand...

That seems pretty conclusive, off now to find more of their videos instead of getting down to the hard work of pissing in a bottle!
 
Felix said:
Very impressive, what did you use?
Click to expand...
The same technique a good bodyshop would use on paint. Use a selection of sanding discs on a random orbit sander finishing with 3000, then a three stage machine polish using 3m fastcut plus, extrafine then ultrafina on their corresponding pads. Finish up with a uv protective sealant :)
 
rookie975 said:
I used the 3M headlight restoration kit with very good results. I made a write up here
Click to expand...

That's a very impressive result. Your experience level seems the same as mine.

I've now taken the cowards way out and bought a bottle of Meguiars Plastx and will apply elbow grease (now machine polisher here), on the basis that it can't do any harm, but I'm not expecting results like yours. I'll take some photos, but still need to get Photo-Bucket account to be able to post online (unless I work out how to do it from my Flickr or Dropbox accounts). I'm beginning to think that I should have asked Father Xmas for a machine polisher, tossing up now between and eBay cheapy or a Meguiars G220.....
 
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