Wet sanding is your friend

So your plastic lenses are hazy and you want to clean them up. Plastic polish helps, but you shoulda really look at wet sanding. You can get pretty good results by hand, so you don't need an expensive buffer. It's worth the extra bit of time and money though.

So here is our guinea pig. The front bumper turn signal in my 90 civic wagon.


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There are a couple cracks, I did my best to clean the debris out of them with a waterpik and then super glued them. If I had a high flow super glue they would have probably hidden better. That's something for a future test.

Here we start out just polishing the left side. You can see an improvement, but it could be better. Also there are some nicks in the lense itself so sanding will help take those out a bit.


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I'm not going to show you how to sand, but the gist of it is just have a supply of water handy and keep the sandpaper wet. It helps keep the friction down and makes your sandpaper last much longer. If you saw my write up about the mirror block off plate, I could never have gotten that finish without wet sanding.

For the lens I started with a 400 grit sandpaper. You could potentially go with a 200 or 320 depending on how pitted the surface is. For lenses though I usually find 400 is enough. I then went to an 800 grit followed by a 1500 and ended with a 2000 grit before polishing. If you want to go higher you can, but you can see my results with the 2000 and polish, so experiment as you will.



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Now you can see on the left that was sanded and polished it is much clearer. The picture isn't stellar so here is another way to show the improvement.

This picture is taken through the polish only side.


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And this one is through the sanded and polished.


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And one final shot showing the lense I've not yet done in comparison to the cleaned up one.


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As I'll be doing a mod to have these lights double as running lights having them clearer is definitely something I'll want.


Let me know if anything else should be covered here and I'll do my best to add it.

Comments

  • therichisgoodtherichisgood New Wagonist
    Looks way better.
    I need to get on doing my tails.
  • Great write up, thanks!
  • greenteagodgreenteagod Moderator
    Thanks guys, appreciate the helpful votes as well. Yeah I've got a tail light I've pulled that I need to work on. The only thing that'll irk me is working on the letters. So much that I'm half tempted to sand them off. They just have some minor scuffs here and there, I think honestly my bumper signals were the worst, maybe that's just cause they were clear.

    Well strike that, the corner lenses were horrible. They looked like shattered safety glass, there was no recovering those. But yeah I'll be sure to post pics up here of the tail lights as well when I do those.

    Doing the bumper light lenses and seeing the price on some of them on ebay just makes me think more I need to get the rest of my stuff set up to do some silicone molds so I can cast fresh ones. Little parts like that are fairly easy to mold. The two tone tail lights might be a bit more of a bear. But anyway, that's another project for another time.
  • civtec350civtec350 Wagonist
    they came out nice. i wet sanded my taillights using if i remember right 1600 grit sand paper. i wore all of the letters off of the bottom of the lenses, by sanding them off.
  • CharbCharb Administrator
    Good stuff here... but did I miss what grit you were using?
  • greenteagodgreenteagod Moderator
    Charb wrote: »
    Good stuff here... but did I miss what grit you were using?
    Thanks Charb, and no you did not, I actually remember thinking about typing that out but I guess I missed it after all. I updated the original post, but just for sake of having it here as a reply to you, 400, 800, 1500, 2000 then some Meguiar's Swirl-X. I might pick up some of their ultimate compound as I think it cuts a little more than the swirl-x.
  • simplyhondasimplyhonda Council Member
    Nice job. Came out great! That is a lot of work, I've done it on some airplane windows before. Same technique.
  • Sweet looks really nice
  • greenteagodgreenteagod Moderator
    Nice job. Came out great! That is a lot of work, I've done it on some airplane windows before. Same technique.

    Yeah it is some work, definitely worth it though. My thought is to get some of that 3m film and cover them to help protect against chips and stuff in the future. These might be part of my molding projects though since it would be a super basic mold. Just eat the cost of maybe getting a fresh set, molding my own and then just be able to produce the front lens since a lot of people don't need the entire housing.
  • DatWagonThoDatWagonTho Band Wagon
    Doing this.. Never knew about the super glue trick...Thanks!!
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