Bringing my Acura’s headlights back to life
Wed Aug 29 21:58:49 2007 EDT (-0400 GMT)My Acura has it headlights pushed out the the top corners of the front end. Like many other cars with a similar design and price-point (the Ford Modeo/Contour comes to mind) the streams of dust and what not they are exposed to with all the highway travel my car sees have obscured the headlight bulbs with a foggy kind of scratching.
What follows is how I fixed this problem to my, ah…. adequate standards. It’s no show worthy solution, but its better than replacing the headlights at over $100 a piece.
Steps:
- Clean the lens with Windex
- Rub and kinda-and-kinda-buff the lens with Brasso. This should start to clear the lens up, but will not fix everything. There’s lots of guides out there on how to use Brasso to restore your iPod, I figured this was similar. Google Brasso and ipod to learn more
- Buff the lens with some wax and a lot of effort — I used a polishing disk on a regular old drill (not a random orbit polisher – again not show quality). The wax I used was MIBRO’s high gloss metal polish. After a good 15 minutes of applying the wax in one direction, polishing, then applying in another, I finally was happy with the results and was almost ready to call it done.
- The final step for me was applying and buffing with BlueMagic’s Liquid Metal Polish as it promised to remove scratches and leave protective finish (and was cheap)
That’s it.
You can see from the picture below from the overcast Saturday I did this on, the lens on the left is nice and clear and the one on the right has yet to be worked on and is all dull and “fogged”. I’ve since noticed an improvement in the headlights intensity at short distances (but no over-all increase in distance).
That’s my solution, and your welcome to save a few hundred with it — but I’m no scientist, metalologist, chemist or body-work specialist. I’m just convinced a little hard work can make a Honda last a long time for little money.
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on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 21:58 and is filed under cars, howto.
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