Resurrecting glass lenses on fog lights or headlights?

[Duh_Vinci]

Re: Why we love U-Pick and Pick-A-Part places...

Now that I have a complete set of spare fogs, going to try the Cerium Oxide on them to see how much can the glass be polished back to "life". Anyone tried?


20190209_141526~2 by Duh_Vinci, on Flickr


Regards,
D

 

[Bogeyman]

Re: Why we love U-Pick and Pick-A-Part places...

I've done it on windshields. Patience, grasshopper. It's a slooow process but it does work.
Rule of thumb is if you can feel it with your fingernail it's too deep, but that probably doesn't apply to lights as they are more prone to pits than scratches.
If you are using the powder keep the slurry fairly thick.

 

[darek_u]

I did try it and it is a waste of time IMHO. It will eventually work after hours of polishing... I always buy new lenses if affordable or give these to the shop that deals with glass - they have special tools that allow to polish the surface properly. If you decide to it - take my advice and don't overheat the glass, it will break. Ask me how I know about this...

 

[dionphaneuf]

Did you ever do this @Duh_Vinci ? I have some of this polish at my place, my lenses are roughhhhhh. Going to wait til a 90-95 R129 shows up in the yard and try and grab those to do this.

 

[Duh_Vinci]

Did you ever do this @Duh_Vinci ? I have some of this polish at my place, my lenses are roughhhhhh. Going to wait til a 90-95 R129 shows up in the yard and try and grab those to do this.

Cheers! No, no I have not... I ended up purchasing a brand new set of lenses, old ones I bubble wrapped and into the box of spares they went. I did, however, use Cerium Oxide to polish out a fairly deep scratches on our "dump truck" S10 windshield left by the faulty wiper blade. State inspector did not want to pass the car as in his opinion, it was with in the field of view of the driver... so...

It did take some elbow grease, and bout 35-40 min of work, but id did smooth it out where the scratches were no more, zero rough edges, jus a smooth curved wave, but definitely no scratches were left. So I think it is indeed worth the effort using Cerium Oxide

 

[GRAEME JOHNSON]

I cracked the lens on my early R129 Fog light when I tried !
Graeme Johnson

 

[gsxr]

R129 fog lights/lenses are still available, and not insanely priced (last I checked). Probably not worth attempting to polish unless you have lots of free time.

Now, something like the C36 fog lights, or W140 AMG fog lights... which are NLA and were >$500 when last available... and the lens isn't sold separately... those would be worth attempting to restore (carefully!).

 

[dionphaneuf]

I got anchored into expectations of $60 per lens based on above post from 6 months ago....now they're 2x that at $117 per. Would love to get a set to tidy up my front end but not at that price right now.

 

[winmutt]

I did my windshield to remove blade fog and it worked great. I decided to do the headlights as well, but was well into a fewhours of sweaty work at that point. Even then, there was a noticeable improvement on the headlights as well.