Headlight restoration tricks

[kennythewelder]

Tailgate banner was a breeze. The hardest part was repainting the letters black. I used aircraft paint stripper I bought from ORillys. Tapped everything off. I sprayed the stripper on, remover as much as I could with a plastic scraped, after I sat for about 30 mins or so. Then wiped off the rest. Then washed what was left, but didn't use a hose, just a bucket of water, and a few rags. . The shine after I striped all of the old clear coat off was amazing. It didn't take much to buff it out, but I painted the letters black before I buffed anything, and let the paint quire for about 3 weeks. Here are a few pick. Yea I know, I need to make a thread.

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[Mildphil]

In short what I did was polish up the lenses as mentioned by other users here, then cleaned the reflectors and shined then up with silicone grease to hide the oxidation of the metal layer. A better method would be to respray the reflective layer with spazstiks if they are very worn. I also used 9012 bulbs converted to work with our lights. In the end though, I did ruin my lights from a previous experiment and had to buy new ones, so I bought the cheapest ones on ebay for a total of about maybe $30 but they work good with the 9012 bulbs. One thing to note, I didn't use the new adjuster brackets the lights came on, instead opting to use the original adjusters by breaking off the original headlights. They work good and don't wobble around at highway speeds. Time will tell how they hold up.

 

[Mildphil]

Here are some pictures of the polishing. That metal layer is pretty delicate which is why I used silivone grease instead of an abrasive. You can see what it looked like before and after.

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Half done

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All done

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Just starting