Following on from the thread about my car being keyed, I repaired both of my rear lights this weekend.
The nearside rear had a scratch all the way across it, about 1.5mm deep, very visible and easily catches your nail as your pass your finger across it. The offside one was scratched about an inch too.
I bought a MicroMesh perspex repair kit from an aircraft supplier who sell them for removing scratches from aircraft canopies. It consists of a foam block, 6 different grades of MicroMesh which is a special fabric based wet abrasive, 2 cotton wipes and some MicroMesh finishing compound.
The kit said to use coarse wet and dry paper, down to 220 grade to remove traces of the scratch, I opted for a more cautious 400 grade. That took about an hour to do both lights, the key is to do it slowly and to reove all traces whatsoever.
Next, starting with the most course MicroMesh, rub only in one direction for a few minutes, I did 3 passes of each light, wiping it down in between. Repeating for all grades, eventually ending at 6000 grade, which is about as coarse as A4 paper...
Finally rubbing using half of the cloth wipe in one direction, using quite a bit of pressure with the cloth wrapped tightly round the block. After a few minutes rubbing the lights were looking pretty damn good, though still some scratches left though.
So I then got the Mer scratch repair drill attachment out and put a plastic bag over it, the cloth then tied and taped it together. I then went over the lights a couple of times using a fairly low speed and just the end of the pad, finally washed them and the results are below. They are pretty much optically perfect which I'm quite happy with.
http://www.muncher.org.uk/lights
The nearside rear had a scratch all the way across it, about 1.5mm deep, very visible and easily catches your nail as your pass your finger across it. The offside one was scratched about an inch too.
I bought a MicroMesh perspex repair kit from an aircraft supplier who sell them for removing scratches from aircraft canopies. It consists of a foam block, 6 different grades of MicroMesh which is a special fabric based wet abrasive, 2 cotton wipes and some MicroMesh finishing compound.
The kit said to use coarse wet and dry paper, down to 220 grade to remove traces of the scratch, I opted for a more cautious 400 grade. That took about an hour to do both lights, the key is to do it slowly and to reove all traces whatsoever.
Next, starting with the most course MicroMesh, rub only in one direction for a few minutes, I did 3 passes of each light, wiping it down in between. Repeating for all grades, eventually ending at 6000 grade, which is about as coarse as A4 paper...
Finally rubbing using half of the cloth wipe in one direction, using quite a bit of pressure with the cloth wrapped tightly round the block. After a few minutes rubbing the lights were looking pretty damn good, though still some scratches left though.
So I then got the Mer scratch repair drill attachment out and put a plastic bag over it, the cloth then tied and taped it together. I then went over the lights a couple of times using a fairly low speed and just the end of the pad, finally washed them and the results are below. They are pretty much optically perfect which I'm quite happy with.
http://www.muncher.org.uk/lights
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