As someone who enjoys vehicles, and getting to buy things for my vehicles I had been shopping for a new headlights on my truck for a quite a while. My current ones had been massively faded and weathered since I bought the truck, and my visibility was low.
The issue I was running into, was that everything I was looking at was far too expensive to justify installing on a 2003 Ram 1500, or I was concerned may not live up to the expectations.
So the decision was made, I was just going to fix the current headlights! I knew they were great quality as they are OEM, but I believed they were salvageable.
And boy was I glad I went this direction! Cleaning up the headlights made things much more visible, and made my truck look newer! Lets take a look at what I had to do to make this all happen.
Side Note: Another cool addition to this vehicle I added recently is the Console Vault, check out my review here.
1. Get rid of major defects
While this first step may not be necessary for everyone. It definitely was for me. Check out the image below to see why. It was full of pitting, scratches, hazing and more.
Basically what this takes is a variable-speed drill that connects to a provided plate. Then you add the 800 grit provided sand paper that fits perfectly on the plate.
From there you spray the headlights with water and start sanding away.
This step can take a while, and if you don’t do it thouroughly it will mess with the later steps. What I did is basically sand until I felt it was down to an even amount, and then moved on to the next section.
Then after finishing that section, would dry the headlight off and make sure everything I had done was even.
2. Sanding with a lighter sand paper
The next step was to lighten the scratches that that 800 grit sandpaper had created.
This consist of using the 1500 grit sandpaper in a similar fashion to the 800 grit, but just with a lighter grit paper. This makes the scratches less noticeable.
Once you evenly, and confidently have this step finished, its time to polish!
3. Polishing
After all of the sanding is done, you remove the sand paper, and add the polishing 3000 grit foam disc.
This step is much easier than the others, and a little less exact. You just run the disc for a while with the PowerPlastic 4Lights solution until everything looks much clearer.
4. Cleaning up the workspace
Once you are one with this, you can wipe and wash down the headlight, and you have like-new headlights!
Conclusion
While the first step was time consuming, and did take a couple tries before getting it right. This was a much cheaper, and a great option instead of buying all new headlights.
I recommend anyone that is at all decent with tools to give this a try!