Restoring Headlights with 3M Kit -EricTheCarGuy

Greetings viewers, Eric the Car Guy here back again with another repair video for you. This time we are going to restore the headlights on this 2007 Honda Civic. Over time the plastic can oxidize on some of these headlights and when it does it creates a film over the top of the lens and makes it difficult for the beam to get out and makes things dimmer and more difficult to see at night. It can get to the point where you almost like have no headlights at all, so this can become a dangerous situation. Now there are other methods out there such as like toothpaste and other home remedies, but I would wager you'd spend a lot of time with those remedies to get them to work. Now I'm not saying they don't work because you know they do. I haven't tried them but I'm pretty sure they do work. However recently I've been introduced to this kit from 3M. Now I am holding up two things here but they both really do the same thing. One is a kit that is for hooking up to a power drill and one is for a kit that doesn't require any tools at all so you don't need to hook it up to a drill or whatever. I've been introduced to these recently and I've found it to be a very efficient way of dealing with oxidized headlights like this. So why don't we get started with this and you can decide for yourself whether it's a decent method or not. Step one is going to be to mask the area because I'm going to be using a drill and even if you're not using a drill you don't want to basically sand your finish on your paintwork. So you want to make sure that you mask off the area around the outside and not wanting to mask the hood. I just open the hood and I don't have to worry about masking that part. Right well as I said I'm going to be using the drill kit for this just for the sake of efficiency. It comes with some rubbing compound, some instructions which I suggest you read. I've actually been to their boot camp and been taught how to do this so I hope I remember and do it correctly. We also find the actual thing that we chuck up to our drill as well as a polishing disc, the Trizac disc. Now this thing has magic powers and then you've got two different levels of sanding discs. You've got these white ones and then also these tan ones here. You start with the coarsest one which would be the tan ones but before I do that I'm going to clean any of the stuff off the headlight. The instructions say to use soap and water. I'm just going to use a window cleaner to start with to try and wipe it clean. You know it's funny just doing this seems to be helping. Maybe they just needed to be cleaned. My main concern is going to be this little protrusion here in the plastic. Trying to work around that. That's another reason why it's good that we masked everything up because this way over here the disc is definitely going to hit the body a little bit and this way it won't mess up the paint. Now my drill has two settings, a fast and a slower. I'm going to be using the slower setting. In the past I've found that doing this too fast can actually cause the plastic to melt a little bit and if that happens you'll be putting into your own imperfections in the lens and you don't want to do that. You want to make it better not worse. I'm going to start with the tan sanding disc. And really like I said this is all you're doing. You're basically just taking off this layer of oxidation. So really it's almost like body finish work. All better. This is a step where you it's where you're going to be taking the most material off. So if you have really bad headlights you may need to do this part more than once. So don't be afraid of that. But now I'm just going to go in with my, well it doesn't look clean, but my clean rag and just sort of wipe the dust away. This is tricky. This might want to get in here with like maybe a little bit of hand sanding but I think it'll work. And I'm about to start with the second sanding disc and I wish I would have mentioned this earlier but when you're when you're doing the sanding you don't want to push hard on the drill. You just want to sort of drag it along. You want to feel some drag but at the same time you don't want to be pushing so hard it brings the motor of the drill down because you can actually damage the surface with that. So you're really just looking to let the sandpaper and the tool do the work. You don't need to really force it down in order for that to happen. And the other thing I'm doing is these long broad strokes to try to get big areas rather than staying in one area for any length of time because you're trying to do the whole lens not just one spot. One thing you'll notice with these finer grit pads is that you might start to see like little scratches beginning. At that time it's a good time to change that disc because the disc will get loaded up with material for a while but I do believe I'm done with this one anyway. But as I said you want to do the bulk of your sanding with those those tan discs to start with. This is bringing things down to a finer level and then the Trizac will bring it down to a finer level still. Once again going to get the rag clean things up. I wish this was oxidized more so you could see the dramatic difference that you often see when you do this. The third and final sanding disc is this Trizac disc and this one as I said kind of has magic powers. This stuff works really well but here's the thing you have to this has to be a wet sand. I'm just going to wet this whole area down and then hit it with this final disc here. If it starts to dry out hit it with some more water. Result dry everything off. That still may appear a little bit foggy but we're not done yet. Our final stage the rubbing compound which they have happily provided for us. Nice little bumpy disc now that we can add that with and also supplied us with rubbing compound itself. I think there's enough in this kit to do more than one vehicle. I'm thinking you might be able to do at least two probably three. I'm just going to take a little bit of compound and put it in the middle. You can always add more later. That looks pretty. At least to me it looks pretty. Yeah it's pretty. Everything's yellow in these glasses. One final wipe down and I'm going to call this done. Now the hand kit has very similar items inside of it. As you can see you've got actually two things of rubbing compound in this one so I guess they expect you to work a little bit harder. But instead of the drill attachment you have this hand attachment that you can use instead of the drill. But all the same discs. Looks like there's some additional Trizax discs in here as well. There's two of them. Looks like we've got maybe even another step beyond what's here. So there may be additional steps with the hand kit but it works the same. But instead of having everything on the drill you're working by hand. So whether you have power tools or not there's a solution for you here. Whether you choose the kit for your drill or for your hands all the same stuff comes in there. However if you buy the stuff for the hands it comes with more stuff. Just a little FYI there. But no matter what if you have oxidized headlights it can be a safety issue for sure. Especially if they get bad enough where it's inhibiting your vision at night. So you want to address that. Whatever method you choose I say go for it. Just follow the basic tips that I've covered here. But this has become my favorite method of dealing with this issue. And honestly I don't have a whole lot of time into this. I probably have less than an hour. Now if your headlights are more badly oxidized than these were it's obviously going to take you a little bit longer. Spend a little more time with that tan disc to try to get as much of that outer coating off as you possibly can. And then you get down to the polishing compound and here you have a nice clear lens by the time you're done. If you have automotive questions that were not addressed in this video I would ask that you head over to air at thecarguy.com. There's a welcome video there to tell you about all of our amazing features and things over there to help you with automotive issues should you have them. Also I'll post links in the description to all of this stuff along with any other important information for you or videos that you might find interesting. In addition to that if you wish to connect with me socially I can be found on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. I post repair videos every Friday so stop back and see me then. And I close each of my videos with be safe, have fun, stay dirty. I'll see you next time.