There are a couple of slight scratches on the plastic headlights of my car. Is cerium oxide (glass polish) too abrasive? Otherwise, what am I best using?

I'd be interested to know also, I have ruined a usable plastic lens doing this in the past

[Edited on 23/1/10 by liam.mccaffrey]

Brasso or equivalent metal polish is quite good for plastics (faces of Swatches for example). Very gentle and slow as it works just like a very fine grinding paste.

Try on an out of the way patch first, as they always say.

Matt

I use Farecla G3 (the paint polishing stuff) on my Yaris headlamp plastics, to brighten them up (they go all hazy over time).

Brings them up all sparkly and clean.

[Edited on 23/1/10 by David Jenkins]

as above g3 is perfect along with a good buffer

Rob

lovely. I have some G3 and a mop. That's tomorrow afternoon sorted.

you can also use wet and dry use p1000 and p1200 followed by brasso the will look as good as new, I used to polish damage out of plastics as part of my job. The buffer may cause more damage so buff on a low speed. I have even used a piece of cardboard before for the final stage of polishing

Probabaly depends on the plastic but I've spent an hour on each of my Laguna lenses. I used one of the cheap ebay/stall polishing kits with the polishing mops which attach to a drill. I used the medium compound to flatten the surface then the finishing compound to polish.

They were in a terrible state with very obvious surface crazing you could feel. I showed them to someone who had seen them before and they asked how much they had cost to replace

Thanks all. C3 and the polisher have done the trick.

Too late for you, but for everybody else, I used to have summer jobs while still a student, and I remember a product used to polish Plastic Helicopter windowsw and windshields.
I canīt recall the name of it, that was quite a while ago.....

Don't use anything amonia based (Brasso), it will attack the plastic and make it cloudy.

At work, insurance companies will pay us 50% of the value of a headlamp if we can repair it. If a plastic lens is scraped, we get it flat with anything from 120g upwards, wet flat and finish with G3 in a polishing mop.

It is quite a good deal on, say an Audi TT, the headlaps are over Ģ800 each!