Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Headlight Plastic Lens Buffing


I purchased a ’04 Ford FreeStar mini van last month to be used for my weekend hunting, camping, fishing expeditions and bug out vehicle. There is virtually nothing wrong with this vehicle except for maybe the plastic headlight lenses. They were a little cloudy, not real bad however well on the way to being a problem. So I went out and purchased the $10.00 Meguiar’s 1-Step Headlight Restoration Plus kit. Like most kits this was a joke. Some of these kits are as high as $35.00. I did purchase the $10 Maguire’s kit but it was worthless.

So I went back to my race car painting days and purchased a can of heavy duty rubbing compound by turtle wax, a product I have used many times before when painting race cars. Sure enough, this compound cut through the oxidized plastic and made everything like brand new!

Moral of this story: Use heavy duty rubbing compound and you will restore the headlight lenses to like brand new for less than $3.00 Just mask off the vehicles paint or the buffing pad can cut through the paint. Total time used per headlight was just 5 minutes.

I should have taken the before photo but I didn’t think this would be worth posting but the cost savings and the speed at which it was done changed my mind.


The after photo. I did wax the lens when I finished buffing it.


The rubbing compound.


The buffing pad used on an electric drill.



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