Your vehicles headlights are absolutely crucial to effectively and safely travel in the dark and in poor weather conditions. You are driving down the highway in the morning when a tremendous fog hits the area. Luckily, you turn on your lights but quickly realize that you still can’t see very well. This is a tramendous safety hazard and you must slow down and pay extreme attention until you get back home. Once you get home, you investigate your headlights to find out they are dirty and frosted over. It’s not just dirt, but it’s also cloudy.
While it may not come to your attention but you, yourself can buy a few materials to completely clean your cars headlights. Below are some helpful tips:
Mask Off
Wash your entire car to remove any and all surface dirt on the vehicle. You should then at least wax within a few feet of the headlight. This way any polishing applied to the headlights will be less likely to adhere to the car.
Apply some blue masking tape and mask around the area around the headlamp that needs to be polished.
Elbow Grease
3M and Permatex sell kits that contain everything you need for just around 10 dollars. If you would like you can also buy the polishing material and some sandpaper separate. Start the process by places some of the polish on the lenses and then clean the area in a circular motion with either a flannel or microfiber cloth. Over time, the polish will dry out and get ground into the cloth; this is what lifts much of the haziness off. Don’t be discouraged if it’s not all coming off right away, as it usually takes around 10 minutes per lens.
It Didn’t Work
In the case that you have been scrubbing one corner of a lens for a few minutes and it’s not perfect, there is still something you can do. Take a 1000-grit piece of sandpaper and let it soak in cold water for around 10 minutes. Take the sandpaper and lightly sand the lens in straight strokes back and forth. Next take a higher grit sand paper, maybe around 1500-grit and sand the lens in the a straight light but at a right angle from previously before.
Finally you can re-polish to the rest of the lens to remove any last bit of haze.
These steps don’t take too much time and they can be extremely important for your safety and other driving on the road.