Headlight Restoration Without the Gimmicks | Complete Sanding Steps

what's up guys it's old anthony welcome to a quick and dirty headlight restoration video where for once i'm getting straight to the point no crazy intro no loud music just me restoring some headlights so today's project is the white honda civic my budget build project that i'm trying to fix up for cheap and i figured one of the best things i could do to increase the overall look of the car as well as help with the visibility at night is to restore these headlights now you can see right here in the video that these things are completely destroyed the clear coat has failed so they're beyond the fact of oxidation they are just in need of a complete restoration so what i'm going to do is walk you through step by step my process on sanding down the entire headlight removing all the clear coat to where it's at bare plastic and get it prepped for paint protection film to keep these things looking good for longer now i realize i've made a video on headlight restoration before on the red honda civic but to be honest that video was far too long so i wanted to make a more concentrated version of that video and get straight to the point so the first thing we want to do is tape off everything that you don't want to hit with sandpaper make sure to pop your hood tape off your fenders tape off your bumper you'll notice i didn't tape off the bumper on this car because i'm replacing it i'm not too worried about it now i'm going to start soaking the headlight down in just pure water i'm taking 1 000 grit sandpaper as my starting point it's a wet dry sanding paper and i'm using a little sanding block now with this i'm going to start scrubbing kind of medium to moderate stroke so i'm not putting on a ton of pressure and you'll start to see that the clear starts bleeding yellow right that's the old oxidized clear that has yellowed and we're going to remove all of that the 1000 is going to be good enough to cut through it typically i don't have to cut down to 800 so 1000 is a really good starting point now you'll notice i'm using a ton of water why so much water anthony because the water provides lubrication and without that lubrication i may catch an edge or i may catch something i don't want to catch and put a deeper gouge into that headlight than i could take out in the later sanding steps so i'm going pretty slow using a ton of water as my lubricant and knocking it down [Music] now at this point you're going to start to notice that the headlight starts feeling smoother and smoother and that's a good sign take a microfiber towel and kind of clean up some stuff to check your work the idea is to make this flat make it a matte finish that's what the 1000 grit is going to do it's not going to shine it up so i'm going through feeling it making sure everything is smooth and if there's any imperfections or deep chips i'm going to go back through and knock out those areas now what i'm doing right here is i'm taking an even smaller sanding block with a small piece of sandpaper to get to the more intricate areas there's tons of different headlights out there that are more intricate and that you want to make sure to get into everything right if you don't universally flatten out this headlight it's not going to look right you basically are going to see the rest of the old clear coat you're going to see some patches and it's just not going to look right so go through with some different size sanding blocks if you can or just take some pieces of small sandpaper and fold them up and try to get into those nooks and crannies and then take your microfiber towel to flatten everything out one thing you can also do is blow on the headlight to kind of speed up the drying process and check your work now what you want to do from here is do the same exact process you just did but now with 1500 grit sandpaper the 1 500 grit is going to continue to improve the headlight before we can move on to the 2000 grit so you're going 1 000 then 1500. now you'll see me here i'm using a different sanding block because i'm using 2000 grit the 2000 grit is going to be a little bit smoother and this block i'm using is a little bit more pliable meaning i can kind of contour it to certain angles now what you're going to notice is when you start spraying down the headlight with water you're going to start to see more clarity of that headlight and that means we're doing a good thing if you don't see clarity if you see some patchiness in the old clear then go back through and knock it down with the 1 500 grit but from here continuing to use the 2000 going through knocking everything down before we jump into the 3000 so now we're getting to the good stuff this right here my friends is 3000 grit trisack paper or trisac disc in this case so what i'm doing is i'm folding it into force and going through without a sanding block this particular disc is kind of foamy feeling and very spongy so it absorbs everything really really well especially when wet and at this point everything feels smooth as glass it feels like freaking butter man this is probably one of my favorite little sanding discs there is they are expensive but boy do they work and they add even more clarity to the headlight once we get to the polishing step so check your work go over it with a towel you'll start to notice that the headlights looking more like a headlight and looking more like a a satin finish rather than a matte finish [Music] so now we're getting into my favorite part of this process which is the machine polishing step oh my god anthony i don't have a machine can i do this by hand yes you can do this like mr miyagi you're just gonna be here doing this for a hundred years basically take a compound and take a towel and go over it and in this case i'm using a little three inch machine with a little wool pad and some compound now this is gonna start to pull out all of the sanding marks we just put in and this is going to glossify and this is going to increase the clarity tenfold it's kind of crazy on what this is actually capable of doing so i'm going through making multiple passes if you do this by hand just start in a quarter with like a microfiber towel and just start doing circular motions straight motions whatever you want to do to start to pull out those sanding marks and so in this case again i'm using the rupes compound i'm using the rupes coarse blue wool pad and once i get to this wipe off you'll see how crazy this is hot damn this may be some of my best work yet this is looking fantastic so all of our hard work is paying off here in the compounding step i called it the polishing step but it really was compounding technically so now we're going to move on to the polishing step so what i'm doing for this i'm moving to a finer foam pad and a finer polishing liquid and so you could also do this by hand if you have a foam applicator and a light polish like i'm doing here and going through this is going to bring out a little bit more clarity on the headlight and so going through making the same passes i was doing before this is what's really going to add a lot of shine to this headlight and really make it look and feel as smooth as glass so the last step is gonna be buffing off our polish and revealing our final result and they look and feel like brand new pretty amazing now again this was a catastrophe situation meaning that my clear coat was completely gone if your headlights are just yellowed there's plenty of products out there that can clean up yellowing this is kind of a worst case scenario but one of my favorite ways to make sure they look and feel like new so my next step here is putting paint protection film on these headlights because there's no clear coat there's no protection so i have to do this step so from here i'm going to go into the paint protection film shop one of my favorite local shops at garage slick and having them put on that film to protect these headlights for years to come so again one last look here at the before you can see the clear coat has failed they needed to be completely sanded and completely restored and bam the after this is technically bare plastic but it is very clear bare plastic at that so next stop is paint protection film hope this video is helpful and i'll catch you guys later anthony peace you

Channel: ALLDAYANTHONY

Views: 27,327

Keywords: honda, civic, transformation, before, after, headlight, restoration, chris, fix, restore, repair, clearcoat, failure, oxidized, yellowed, polishing, faded, restore yellowed headlights, fix oxidized headlights, headlight clear coat failure fix, best headlight restoration, chris fix headlight restoration, how to polish headlights, fix peeling headlights, how to fix bad headlights, how to sand headlights, make headlights like new, best headlight fix, fix headlights like a pro, headlight refinishing

Id: OsnN4U7alRM

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021