The EASIEST DIY Headlight Restoration Ever!

[Music] all right what's going on guys and welcome back to the channel now today we're gonna be working on my 2002 Subaru Legacy GT if you haven't seen the previous videos on this car I'd recommend checking them out and I'll make sure to leave a link above but anyways what we're gonna be doing today with the car is we're going to be doing my DIY version of a headlight restoration so with that the one thing that you need to consider is that you don't need to go out and buy a headlight restoration kit can you and do it that way yeah sure if you want to read all the instructions and you can do it that way but I think this is gonna be a much more cheaper alternative so the biggest reason that you want to actually polish your headlights is just due to visibility at night so what will happen is if you have a foggy lens is that the light will not be projected as well as if it were coming out of a clear lens if you have a clear lens versus a fogged up lens you're gonna be able to see better at night and overall - it's gonna make the front end of the car look a lot better and just due to the fact that it doesn't look kind of dated and old so let me show you what the car looks like right now and then we can get started so here's what the headlights look like in direct sunlight and as you can see you can't really see the details of the headlight that are in this general area and on the turn signal side it looks okay but you can definitely tell right here that for example there's a line that goes across the housing like this that's completely fogged up to the point where you can't see it when it's in direct sunlight and on the other side it's kind of the same story this one might even be a little bit worse but you just can't really see the details of the headlight and these are signs that the surface is pretty contaminated and if you hear right now my hand going across the headlight it sounds almost like sandpaper and what we want this to be is super smooth now before we get started with showing you the products that we're going to be using today I do want to give you a heads up that I am not sponsored by anybody this is just basically going off of my experience and it's just an unbiased opinion on what I think really works so what we have here is I just have a guys is microfiber towel as well as two of their different applicator pads so this one is actually gonna be for the waxing phase to protect the lens and this is gonna be the cutting pad that's gonna be good for polishing now what I have here is I just have some carnuba wax I usually use Turtle Wax just because it's cheap and it works and this stuff I really recommend McGuire's Plastics and this is where we're actually gonna be using to restore the headlights and polish them with we also have a signature glass cleaner from Chemical Guys now you don't need to use chemical geysers specifically you can even use Windex that you would use in your house it really doesn't matter all we're gonna be using this for is to just clean the surface so what we're gonna start off with is the glass cleaner as well as the microfiber towel and all we're gonna do is just spray down the lenses and clean them off to try and get rid of as many contaminants as possible before we start the polishing face spray it on like that and a quick wipe down and you'll even see as soon as you apply the glass cleaner it looks like it's doing a really good job at cleaning up the headlight and making it look a hundred times better but what's gonna happen is the product is gonna evaporate and it's going to go back to the foggy stage that it was in before because what the glass cleaner is basically doing is it's seeping in and it's covering the imperfections on the lens and making it look good temporarily so let me do the other side real quick [Music] something else I would recommend is just popping the hood on your vehicle so with popping the hood it actually helps gain more access to the top line over here so that you don't miss anything when you're actually masking all this off now that we've cleaned the surface with the glass cleaner what we want to do now is we want to use some painters tape to mask this off and you can get any just normal blue tape from a hardware store or even some grocery stores I know sell this stuff okay so I tape off the edges and if you really wanted to you could tape off this edge over here you know I've done this in the past I'm getting pretty good at it so I can just kind of avoid getting anything on this and even if you do get a little bit on this side it's not a big deal it's not the end of the world there should be able to wipe off pretty easily now let's get to work on actually polishing this so what I'm going to be using is I'm gonna be using our cutting pad and the reason that this is a cutting pad is just due to the fact that the composition of the actual applicator pad itself is a little bit more rough and aggressive in comparison to this one which is more for finishing which is a lot smoother this is good at work almost like a sandpaper just a lot less aggressive than a sandpaper I would almost consider it to be something on the lines of maybe like a really high grit sandpaper but it's gonna give us enough abrasiveness so that when we apply the polish itself it should go on and I'll show you guys exactly what happens when we do that so all we're gonna do is take our plastic polish now we're gonna shake it up a little bit and you do not want to go crazy with the product itself you only need to maybe have a couple dots on the pad total so let's do like four dots like so and there should be all that we really need so now when we come over here what we want to do is we want to spread the product evenly you don't want to immediately just start scrubbing away because of what's gonna happen is it's just gonna lather it and you're not going to get that abrasiveness from the applicator pad itself so you almost want to treat it like you're gonna be polishing a car so you got to go like this and you're just gonna press down and you see how it leaves those marks like that in that same pattern that we have on the pad we're just going to do that all the way across and then you want to pick a direction that you want to scrub you could either go this way or you can go this way but you do not want to do circular motions so all right let me put the camera down and we'll come back to this in a sec [Music] all right and look at the difference as you can see the polish really helped bring this out so you can see all the details inside the headlight lens itself and if you don't believe me I haven't done the other side so let's go take a look at the other side so just remember that this is just after one pass I mean look at the difference look at how fogged up this is you could barely even see through it that's just amazing so what I'm gonna do in the meantime is I'm gonna finish polishing up that one headlight that we just did and then I'm also gonna polish the other side and then when we come back I'll show you how to protect the headlight lens so I'll see you in a sec [Music] all right and we're back now I finished up both of the headlights and I mean while I slide the stuff out I actually went ahead and polished up the fog lights and I don't know if you guys are ready for this but I can't believe that this is the same car just after 10 minutes of just scrubbing away with some elbow grease so let's check it out they look so good even the fog lights came out pretty good too and it just goes to show that just a little bit of time and effort and being patient with your work you can get some really good results and there was no sanding no headlight restoration kit instructions it just took maybe what 15 minutes tops it really transforms the look of the car too I'm really digging the bug deflector too and I really like this it definitely serves its purpose but it looks pretty cool too in my opinion let me know what you guys things down in the comments down below so now what we need to do to preserve the work that we've done on polishing these is we need to apply wax so I want to show you guys real quick how to protect these it's nothing too crazy it'll probably take you less than 10 minutes to do so I'll show you real quick so the product that we're going to be using today is we're going to be using turtle waxes carnuba wax and i know that this is a super old bottle but this stuff lasts a really long time and it's a great investment just having your garage if you plan to do any auto detailing in the future and what I have here is I have our finishing pet so in comparison to the cutting pad it's a lot less abrasive it's it's smoother so that there's a lot less friction that's going to be happening when you apply whatever product are you going to be using on this so we're going to be using that so as we come over here we're gonna just basically do what we did last time and I'm gonna do shake this up and we just want to apply just the dot it's got to be careful that not all this comes out at once that's more than plenty and what we want to do is we want to spread the product around on the lens so I'm just going to go right here so and then you just lightly apply and if you wanted to you could have kept the tape on it but for me since I've done this plenty of times it doesn't you know freak me out if I get a little bit of wax on the edges you could just wipe that off so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna finish up waxing these and I'll see you guys in a sec a few moments later alright guys and we brought the car outside because I just wanted to give you a quick walk around and just show you the difference of what it looks like and just really love the way that this came out and I don't know if you guys remember what it looked like before but I'll make sure to leave a picture or a video of what it looked like before in comparison to what it looks like now and now you can see all the details in the headlight and even when I run my finger across its it's super smooth now and that's something that we didn't get before with this alright guys and thank you so much for watching and if you want to stay tuned for what happens with this car as well as all the other cars in my fleet make sure to subscribe for more and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Bendaga's Garage

Views: 226,551

Rating: 4.7390623 out of 5

Keywords: diy headlight restoration, headlight restoration, how to restore headlights, how to clean headlights, headlight, foggy headlights, headlight restoration kit, headlight restore, clean headlights, how to restore foggy headlights, headlights, restoration, how to make headlights clear, headlight cleaning, easiest headlight restoration, bendagas garage, bendaga, how to clear up headlights, chemical guys, restore headlights, diy, diy headlights, how to, cars, cleaning headlights

Id: rvXWEhnBqDg

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/JadeyMLegacy]

Great Tutorial! I've got the Rev-D JDM lights in my 03 Legacy, but man I kinda miss the GT lights now.