various
James at ringsperformance.com
James at ringsperformance.com
Sun May 4 14:05:31 EDT 2003
> Unfortunately, polycarbonate plastics "haze" with time - take a look at any
> early 90's Dorf pickup truck or Taurus - the headlight lenses have
> "cataracts" and of course, that makes it really difficult to see the
> pedestrians you don't want to hit in the first place - the light output is
> *severely* degraded. With most mass-market cars, this isn't a huge issue
> anyway, because enough other stuff has disintegrated by this time that the
> vehicle is ready for the scrap heap, so the fact that the headlights are
> totally useless is moot.
A friend had this exact problem (along with many others: blown trans, etc) on his '87 Mercury Sable. I conned him into spraying the lenses with methylene chloride and it polished them right up. DO NOT TOUCH THE LENS UNTIL THE MC HAS DONE ITS WORK AND EVAPORATED AGAIN, you'll scratch the hell out of the softened plastic; if you use a rag, fibers will get left behind, etc. This spray can be found at your local auto paint supply store, under the moniker "Plastic Primer" or some such, $7-10 for 9-ounce can. At work we also employ subcontractors to "vapor polish" machined Ultem parts back to a shiny surface using MC.
YMMV and
cu, James Marriott
'87 4kq (alias "late-B2 90q") with rare ersatz NG engine, 184k, being restored from rear-end total loss
'89 200q (MC1, ProconTen/no bag, 1.8 blah blah), 151k, already been un-totaled
Boise, ID, USA http://www.webpak.net/~marriott/
www.ringsperformance.com
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