Repairing Tarnished Headlights

We’ve posted a “how to” article on repairing plastic headlight lenses that have become tarnished, faded and yellow with age. In our pictorial article How To Polish Tarnished Headlights, we show you how with a bit of time and few simple materials, headlight lenses can be refurbished. This not only improves the appearance of your vehicle, but profoundly improves the headlight’s ability to project light. The seeds for this article were planted back in December, 2004 on a trip into Calgary. My wife’s car at that time was a 6 year-old Dodge Stratus. Adding some salty road spray to the tarnished headlights equaled extremely poor visibility at dusk. As we drove along a dark secondary highway, I could barely see the road. My first thoughts were to replace the headlight assemblies. But knowing the heavy expense that they carried and the fact that I knew that we were not keeping the car for much longer, I did an internet search first. Much to my surprise, specialized repair kits existed for this malady, but I needed a fast repair before our return ten hour journey. My interpretation of the information gleaned on this search suggested that some fine polishing could go a long way toward cleaning these lenses up. I bought some chrome polish, removed both headlight assemblies and brought them inside. Then I got to work, and man did I work. I spent over 90 minutes per side, but the results were well worth it. On the trip back the improvement in visibility was quite stunning. As you’ll see in this article, I have since found some mechanized alternatives that not only improve the process, but save a whole lot of time and elbow grease.