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aerog
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I'm restoring my "best British Sports Car" :wink: bit by bit. 2008 was some interior trim and new seats. This year I've got exterior trim to replace, brakes, a new top, and lots of detailing to do. This headlight stuff probably applies to some newer <span style="font-style: italic">real</span> British cars that have plastic/polycarbonate headlights (to be honest I like my MGB glass lamps, but that's another story)
The headlights on my Miata/MX5 have slowly started to haze over. The sun/heat actually had started to distort some of the lens on the driver's side. None of it was really serious but I thought I'd address them before it got worse.
I read up on some of the headlight restoration techniques and decided to just get a cheap consumer-level kit. 3M and Mothers looked good, I chose Mothers for $25. It comes with sanding pads in four different grades (800, 1000, 1500, and 2000 grit), polish, a small foam polishing ball made to be used with an electric drill, and a microfiber cloth.
It was hard to show the flaws in the headlights in pictures but this comes close:
I started with the driver's side (the worst of the two) by removing the trim bezel (an semi-permanent option on the Mazda and a pain to remove) and masked the paint & trim around the light:
Then the work begins. The kit comes with four grades of sanding pads that you use to wet-sand the lens. Each grade is followed by the next highest grade done 90° to the previous. The higher the grade, the longer you have to sand to cut through the previous grade's "damage". I planned ahead so the last grade was across the lens - which seemed easier to me.
As the sanding progresses the headlight turns more and more opaque and milky looking, leaving a wet slurry that I wiped down between grades:
Mother's instructions say to jump right into using their polish and polishing ball but I added an intermediate step. I used a dual-action buffer with a heavy foam pad and "Flitz" metal polish. It quickly brought the lens up quite a bit:
I finished up with the polish and polishing ball Mother's includes in the kit. Both products did a very good job removing traces of the wet-sanding and brought the lenses up to crystal clear:
Polycarbonate lenses are relatively thick and hard so this process isn't really difficult. I think it would work on other plastics pretty well with a lighter polishing pad a patience.
The headlights on my Miata/MX5 have slowly started to haze over. The sun/heat actually had started to distort some of the lens on the driver's side. None of it was really serious but I thought I'd address them before it got worse.
I read up on some of the headlight restoration techniques and decided to just get a cheap consumer-level kit. 3M and Mothers looked good, I chose Mothers for $25. It comes with sanding pads in four different grades (800, 1000, 1500, and 2000 grit), polish, a small foam polishing ball made to be used with an electric drill, and a microfiber cloth.
It was hard to show the flaws in the headlights in pictures but this comes close:
I started with the driver's side (the worst of the two) by removing the trim bezel (an semi-permanent option on the Mazda and a pain to remove) and masked the paint & trim around the light:
Then the work begins. The kit comes with four grades of sanding pads that you use to wet-sand the lens. Each grade is followed by the next highest grade done 90° to the previous. The higher the grade, the longer you have to sand to cut through the previous grade's "damage". I planned ahead so the last grade was across the lens - which seemed easier to me.
As the sanding progresses the headlight turns more and more opaque and milky looking, leaving a wet slurry that I wiped down between grades:
Mother's instructions say to jump right into using their polish and polishing ball but I added an intermediate step. I used a dual-action buffer with a heavy foam pad and "Flitz" metal polish. It quickly brought the lens up quite a bit:
I finished up with the polish and polishing ball Mother's includes in the kit. Both products did a very good job removing traces of the wet-sanding and brought the lenses up to crystal clear:
Polycarbonate lenses are relatively thick and hard so this process isn't really difficult. I think it would work on other plastics pretty well with a lighter polishing pad a patience.
