Today, we will show some products you can find over the counter that will polish up your old hazy yellow headlights to clear shine.
First things first. Let’s name the products we will be using:
| Mothers Powerball (the original red ball, not to be confused with the new powerball 4 paint) |
Megiuars PlastX
|
A Terry cloth to apply the product initially and then a microfiber towel to wipe off leftover / excess product.
The process is extremely simple from this point on if you’ve used the powerball before. If you haven’t, then no worries. The learning curve is pretty quick. I won’t go into setting up the powerball with a drill, as this video does a great job explaining it:
Firstly you need to wash the headlight as you don’t want to be polishing dirt particles! You will just be rubbing in a mess and making the powerball dirty. Once you have attached the powerball to the drill, you can get a nice polished headlight in about 30 seconds.
Before doing any of this work on your car, you will want to tape off the surrounding painted areas of your car with a tape that will not damage your paint. The video at the bottom of this post shows the headlight masked off and how you should do it. Now on to the instructions.
First, apply the Megiuars PlastX on the Terry towel and then spread that out onto the headlight. We don’t need a lot here so remember to put enough to cover the headlight so the powerball has something to work with.
Now we simply run the mothers powerball over the headlight until you do not see the PlastX product anymore. Take the microfiber towel at this point and wipe off any product left. Now you will see a dramatic improvement.
If you still feel its not clear enough you can polish the headlight further by doing a second application.
Let’s see some before and after pictures of my car’s headlights on my Integra:
Before:
After:
If you do look close enough you will see some pitting left over. That cannot be completed with this method and would require the headlight to be wetsanded first and then polished using the same method as above. The reason is the damage is in the Plastic of the headlight and it needs to be smoothed out. For that case, you may want to use the Meguiars Professional Headlight Restoration Kit
For a video of another Mother’s product with basically a mini powerball type of material made for your headlights watch this:
Using the larger powerball is essentially the same method shown in that video, just that the powerball is much larger.
Good luck and hope everyones night time visibility just got better.