Mother's Headlight Restoration Kit - A Little Light Work

Seeing as we're talking of restoring old lenses, though ours weren't cracked, many will be. Easing the crack apart on these old Buick lenses allowed us to clean the edges of the split with an old toothbrush and soapy water.

Here's what the headlight restoration kit is really designed for and it'd be remiss of us not to show you how well it works. It took longer to mask around the headlights to prevent polish getting on the paint than it did to restore the clarity of the plastic lenses on this late model.

The Mothers' kit includes a couple of sanding pads of different grits, which were ideal for sanding between the ridges on the outside of the lens.

After polishing with the PowerBall, a little elbow grease using the microfiber towel included in the kit brought the headlamps back to as-new condition.

Encouraged by our attempts so far, we tackled the old taillights from our project '49 Chevy. The lenses and reflectors are plastic and had suffered over the past 60 years.

Hitting the lens with the PowerBall and polish, they soon took on a whole new appearance. You can see here the small cracks that appear in the plastic over time. Unfortunately there's nothing that can be done about those.

Removing the lens and blue dot, we cleaned the grime from the inside using an old toothbrush and soapy water.

With the lens cleaned and polished, we re-installed the blue dot, after cleaning it and its retaining ring. These four tabs are twisted to hold everything in place.

No wonder these lights appeared dim when in use. This is supposed to be the reflector, but had turned into a rust-flector over time.

Here's a before and after. The lens is brighter, clearer, and respectable once again. The reflector admittedly could do with replacement, while the bezels would certainly benefit from a trip through the Spectra Chrome process. All in all a vast improvement for a couple of hours of work though. Although, what are the chances of me doing the other light to match?

We used the plastic polish on the reflector, and applied Mothers' chrome polish to the bezels in an attempt to bring them back from the dead.

A trip through the sandblasting cabinet saw the housing as good as new, before it was painted using an aerosol of alloy wheel silver paint. Time to bolt it all back together.