Clear paint on heaflight turnrd white. Think i am screwed.

Buffing with cutting compound and hitting with the meguires again and you get this. 

Little bit of fog but I think that may be on the inside. Hard to tell as it is overcast now

Think we saved it

dean1484 said:

Think we saved it

Hell yeah man! Great work!

I would rather cut and buff once a year than do that again!!! 

But it is fixable if anyone makes this mistake. 

Abreviated how to fix

use gum out carb cleaner and liberally  spray while scraping from top to bottom. Do not let the gum out dry while scraping or you end up with a mess. Repeat this two or three times until  nothing more comes off. 

You will now be convinced you have completely trashed your headlights but have faith.

Next dry sand with 220 grit and a small electric sander. Even passes and light to medium pressure. You don’t want to get any heat as it will turn things on to a gummy mess. Sand till you can feel and see no traces of the paint and you only have a completely foggy headlamp. 

At this point you will want to go on line looking for replacements but have faith as this is the worst it gets.  

Now wet sand with 800. Again I use a sander as it is faster and using a sander I can skip several grits. I make at least 5 or 6 slow passes over everything.

it should  start to look better now

I then wet sand with 1000 grit  I do this by hand as you only really need one or two passes.  

May this point wash it down and wipe clean  look for any signed of the paint or scratches  spot sand as needed to get rid of them  

then I hit it with some 3m medium cutting compound and then a final buff with the Meguires polish from there headlight kit and you should be done. 

Edit:  I forgot to add that the gumout and paint mix you scare off will stick and harden to thinks like paint and trim so protect things as needed. 

Looks like total time to fix this was about 1.5 hours. 

All that labor (and I feel badly for you, we share our luck) is juuuuuuuust about worth $125.00.

Good save though, much more satisfying than whipping out a credit card.

I kind of had to fix it. With sunset at about 4:10 pm these days I do a lot of driving at night. I was doing this to see if it would help things as the low beams on this car suck at the moment.  I wanted to eliminate the plastic as a potential problem as I am 99 percent sure the projectors have gone bad. As it happens the one I painted first was the much better of the two so the car would have been virtually underivable at night unless I did something. 

I also figured that I could probibly not make it worse. There are worse things I could be doing than working on this out side on a 55 degree day. We will not see many more days like this until next spring. 

dean1484 said:

Think we saved it

Oh good!  I was pulling for you.

I always put a little of the good yellow wax on my refinished headlights, gets them lasting at least a little while longer.  My WRX headlights responded really well to the DEET treatment, some wax after that and they looked new for months.  The lights on my Land Cruiser don't really respond to the DEET, just a cut n buff.  I really want to pull them off the car and hit them with a proper polisher and reclear them, but at that point I may as well buy the DEPO ones and convert to projectors.  

I once glued a loose lens back in a Caravan with clear silicone.  Pure white after a day, on the inside of the lens.

Poop.

I miss glass headlights. 

"Test spray in an inconspicuous area for compatability"

dean1484 said:

There paint reacts with what ever headlight plastic is made of. You need clear paint specifically for headlights. 

I did not know this

they should say this on the can. My headlights are about $125 a side. If these were Porsche headlights that would be a whole different level of cost. 

Not sure how you can blame Krylon for this...



Glad you got it sorted, however.

I should have tested but it never occurred to me. I have done this many times with out issue. Just glad it was my car. 

I seem to end up doing a fair number of these for friends and family. 

I also think I got this at an auto parts store. Not one hundred percent on that at the moment. 

That's one of the reasons I put Lamin-X over headlights instead of the clear paint. It's annoying when paint goes wrong.

That 303 protectant will help keep the thing from going bad again,  quite as fast. 

I had a really similar experience to this about 5 or 6 months ago using some cans that an ex coworker told me he used to use all the time. I had already brought one light back beautifully and was just giving it a shot, but i ended up buying two new housings to unberkeley how bad that stuff screwed up the one headlight, and then wanting the other one to match. Luckily in my case a pair of two aftermarket housings was $100. Too bad I cant get the time i put into the old housings back. Live and learn... 

Seems that it might be cheaper to buy new ebay lights but I’d think that the quality of them might be lacking enough to justify saving the oem’s.  

Both in light quality and housing longevity.   Just a guess though....

nice job here!!!  Looks like all was not lost :)

If it makes you feel better, I used the clear coat from Meguiar's headlight restore kit to coat a new set of headlights for my Samurai and it started to flake off after one offroad rally. Maybe I didn't do enough prep, but they were squeaky-clean and fresh out of the box so I figured they wouldn't need much.

Well, technically to apply clear you don't want an already-polished surface, you want something like 800 grit and then lay on enough clear to wetsand and polish that.

If it's daily beater status, really abbreviated way to maintain.  Get old clean tee shirt rag. Spray tiniest bit of brake parts cleaner on rag, promptly buff headlight with rag like crazy and don't stop moving. Allow to set for at least an hour. Wax regularly.  Repeat as needed.

Tip is to go really easy with brake clean. Start with less than you think. Way less.

Cut 95+% of haze is total of 5 minutes.

Apexcarver said:

If it's daily beater status, really abbreviated way to maintain.  Get old clean tee shirt rag. Spray tiniest bit of brake parts cleaner on rag, promptly buff headlight with rag like crazy and don't stop moving. Allow to set for at least an hour. Wax regularly.  Repeat as needed.

Tip is to go really easy with brake clean. Start with less than you think. Way less.

 

Cut 95+% of haze is total of 5 minutes.

Bonus: You're just moving the headlight lens material around instead of sanding it off