Headlight housing polishing

[iamvanja]

Started to notice these little dots. Would polish fix this? If so, what/how did you do it?

[Opie55]

I actually have a fair amount of personal experience with this. I have done several cars. Also, because they are lower down, the fog lights are usually far more pitted. I posted some after pics in the "what did you do to your car today" thread last March after completing my fogs.

Whether you can remove them with polish alone depends, but the answer is typically no, or at least not entirely. They are pits from gravel/sand, and as pits most are deeper than typical clear coat scratches that can be polished out. But let's be clear what polish means - no polish you can apply by hand will do anything. You need a DA polisher and some reasonably aggressive cutting compound like M105. Then you can get some smaller pits out with a fair amount of effort. Keep in mind that to remove a pit of any size you have to remove the surrounding material to the same depth. That's what polishing is, paint or anything else. Any of the over the counter headlight remedies will be a short-term cosmetic fix at best, and those really focus on the yellowing, not pits.

However, your headlights can be made to look absolutely perfect like when new, but only with a multi-step wet sanding process followed by polishing. It would take me about an hour per headlight to do it. But the issue with doing that is that it removes the clear coat on the headlights. Headlights all have a fairly thick UV protectant clear coat. That needs to be replaced somehow. They make a spray version that is then cured with a infrared heat lamp, or there is a company that makes a wipe on kind that comes in a syringe and sells for about $65 for a couple tablespoons.

An in between solution is to sand with only the finer grits - 1500 and above - then polish. They will look a whole lot better and you don't cut through the clear coat. That would take me about 20 minutes per light.

Probably more info than you were looking for.

[jjasonSU]

Like we're like that when I purchased it, 38k miles.
Came out beautifully after wet sanding similar procedure to described above

[iamvanja]

Thank you gents! Appreciate all the details. Looks like finer grits sanding is the way to go.

[6coupe]

I've used this post wet-sand and polish to provide UV protection and it seems to hold up very well, the headlights don't discolour from UV exposure. You can reapply as part of your cleaning routine, to top up the polish and protection.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

[BMWenthuziast]

Originally Posted by 6coupe

I've used this post wet-sand and polish to provide UV protection and it seems to hold up very well, the headlights don't discolour from UV exposure. You can reapply as part of your cleaning routine, to top up the polish and protection.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Thanks!