Quote:
Originally Posted by particlewave
You may have heard good things about this, or had good luck with that, but nothing will be as good as real automotive clear coat sprayed on by a pro. Period.  |
Yeah, we can probably agree on that. Some of us are just looking for the best of the almost-as-good-as-professional approach. I read in some post somewhere (I can't seem to find it anymore) the idea about prepping the headlight, then taking it into a body shop and having them do a quick spray at the end of spraying another vehicle. That actually seemed like a pretty good idea, and one that probably wouldn't be that costly.
My question, though, is the prepping. The whole reason I'm messing with this at all is that I replaced the passenger side headlamp last September following a fender-bender (a monumentally stupid moment on my part--I THOUGHT the guy in front of me at a busy intersection had committed to go...he hadn't) in which the light was damaged. Now the passenger-side lamp is brand new (no scratches, no yellowing) and the driver side one (which had looked pretty decent to me previously) now looks horrible. Relatively speaking. I don't think there's any way I'm going to get the one looking anything like the other at this point. Even if you sand the hell out of them, do you ever really get all that yellowing out? (The older one has virtually no scratches or cloudiness--it's just yellowed with time.) I think this is all the more true in that I think some of the yellowing is of components on the inside and, despite all your helpful instructions and video, Charles, I'm not sure I want to tackle opening this thing up for purely cosmetic reasons.
Woody, I had pressed the body shop guy to let me obtain a gently-used headlamp from you (remember us talking? I was afraid that with the cost of these lights they were gonna end up totalling the car?) He was not flexible on the issue. I hadn't really thought about this angle: not only could I get a second-hand light cheaper from you, but the car actually would have cosmetically tooked better with two headlamps that had seen a few years in the sun instead of having an old one side-by-side with a new.
Quote:
Originally Posted by itsnotanova
X2. The spray can stuff doesn't have a hardner in it and they''ll go dull after some time.
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I'm not sure that's true. Correct me if I'm wrong, OCG, but isn't that what that circular red thing is for, the one on the top of the 2k clearcoat? You pull it off, affix it onto the little rod at the bottom of the can, and whack it, to open up a smaller canister inside, releasing a hardener?
Anyway, my question remains as before. My "bad" light is about as yellowed as your passenger-side one, Kevin. Even with aggressive sanding, I don't think it's realistic to think it'll ever look even close to the driver-side one. Maybe I should pick up a used one and sell the hardly-used new one for good money