Headlights: Polish or Sand

[Halm]

Another thread got me thinking again about my 996 headlights. They were deeply pitted plus areas of thick crud of some sort. It seems that there 2 schools of thought on how to approach this: Polish or Sand. I had tried P21S metal polish with little to modest results. The referenced thread suggested Meguiar’s PlastX. So, I went picked up a bottle of it this morning.

While both polish and sanding would eventually remove the UV protection layer on the headlights, my feeling was that the polish would take several applications while the sanding would do so immediately. I would prefer to polish if possible. But if that didn’t help, I was prepared to sand and had 2 different commercially available kits.

Here is a picture of my passenger side headlight before I tried anything. In particular, note the lower right section and how bad it is. The top of the light, while not as obvious, is almost as bad.





I then spent about 30 minutes hand and machine polishing with PlastX. The results were much better than when I started, but the pitting was still there as were the bad areas. But it was much better. . . Just not what I thought I could achieve.




The 2 commercial kits I had were similar in content but also a couple of differences. One was the well known product by 3M and the other from FixMyHeadlights.Com. The 3M product used a power drill for all sanding and polishing while the other was done by hand. But I thought it was important that the FixMyHeadlights product included UV protection as the final step.

I started with the FixMyHeadlights kit. I wet sanded by hand with 400, 1000 and 2000 grit sandpaper. And as all products illustrate, the lens at somepoint look like they are ruined.


After sanding, I used the polishing compound, first by hand. I thought that was inadequate and pulled out my drill and the polishing pad in the 3M kit. The results were good but not like the pictures in all the product advertisements.



I then backtracked and pulled out the final sanding pad from the 3M kit, re-sanded and re-polished, both with the drill. The results were now close to what I thought could be accomplished.



I next moved to the driver's side light and only used the 3M kit. This only took about 20 minutes. Both lights were finished with the FixMyHeadlight's UV protection product.

Final thought? I think the PlastX product is great if your lights are not badly pitted or you just want a really deep clean. Otherwise, you will have to sand. The 3M kit is great. I am just not sure what to do about long term UV protection. YMMV

[LanceGT4]

Thanks Hal
Great write up and good pictures of your progress.
I've been watching mine and prodding the lazy brain cells to get going in this one.

[Schwarzeritter]

When I get back to my house I'll take a picture of this Japanese stuff I use, I totally forget the name, but I'll post it when I get back home. It's really useful on head lamps and tail lamps and you never want to sand lamps.