Celica Forums General Discussion Exterior What do you peeps use to clean your headlights?

My headlights are starting to look like crap from the outside.
Is there any cleaner or anything I can use to make my
headlights look new or clean lookin?

use some wax

Using wax on my headlights.
Would that take all the residue and marks off?

This is what you need to get them shiny as brand new

i used a clay bar on it and waxed it afterwards and it looks great!

Thanks for the replies.
I'm gonna try one of those cleaners on the weekend

Yeah, I used regular car wax, I think it was Mothers a couple weeks ago, looks good even though I bet I could put more time into it and make it look better, but still. Here is a pic.

Thanks for posting a picture.
It looks like I will be using wax on my
headlights. This weekend

There is a weird and cheap way to clean you're lights if you have the money buy a kit if not and you don't want to spend alotta money go to Walmart and buy some avacoto...like what you make guacamole out of cut it in half and squeeze some of the juice on it and use the skin and run it in it might souls crazy but next to the kits and wax it works the best lol

I used a turtle wax kit from autozone. It didn't cost very much and got A LOT of yellow off my lights which when I bought the car looked like they had never really been cleaned.

My headlights were particularly manky, the local autoparts store had nothing, so improvised...


Step 1. Clean surface of headlight with glass cleaner.

Step 2. Mask off bodywork around light.

Step 3. Using a lambswool rotary buffing pad and liberal amounts of cutting paste, (used in bodywork repair, similar to 3000 grit paper), to keep the surface cool, work the surface of the polycarbonate with the drill on a slow speed else paste will go everywhere!.

Step 4. Clean off all the cutting paste, then using T-Cut and a cloth, work the surface until glass smoooooth.

Step 5. Polish with Wax.

The whole process took nearly 3 hours, but the result was worth it


Before:


After:


Side-by-side:

Using an abrasive on your headlights will work wonders, but i would never recommend it any more than is absolutely necessary. Do it more than a few times though and you may need new headlights all together.

I should add that gentle pressure should only be applied, and let the paste do the work.

In a previous career I learnt how to guild and French polish with shellac etc. so I'm very patient. I would be surprised if a few more than a few microns of polycarbonate were removed. The motor is ten years old now, so would be surprised if the lights would need doing again. Next stop, a GT86 anyway!

That makes more sense. Have any tips on buffing up some rims? I've been thinking about refinishing them all together but If theres an easier way than grinding, wet sanding, and polishing id be up to hear it.

I'm looking to get my alloys sorted too, but for the same price as getting a firm to do it, I can get a set of nearly new alloys from eBay and then scrap the old ones - good scrap value for aluminium at the moment

I use the turtle wax headlight cleaner i believe it is $15 - $20 for the kit you just have to put a little elbow grease into rubbing the different pads on the headlight to clean it. Works wonders though after you are done