(upbeat rock music)
- Hey everyone, Sam Battersby from Griot's Garage,
and today we're gonna talk about
our ceramic headlight restoration kit
for severe oxidation.
The ceramic headlight wipes are powered by our partners,
Cerakote Ceramics,
and this kit provides you everything you need
to restore two severely degraded
or oxidized headlight lenses
back to crystal clear condition
in just a matter of a few minutes.
Our headlight restoration kit includes
two oxidation remover wipes,
one for each lens,
two ceramic headlight wipes,
again, one for each lens,
four wet sanding foam discs.
You have two 1000 grit discs, one for each lens.
and then you have one 2000 grit
and one 3000 grit disc.
These are going to be split between both lenses.
Comes with our contour grip pad holder
to make it a comfortable process using the sandpaper,
as well as the ever important instruction sheet.
Please make sure you do read this.
The only things the kit doesn't provide
that you are going to need
are masking tape and a spray bottle full of purified water.
It also comes with nitrile gloves
so you can protect your hands
from the oxidation remover wipes
and the coating wipes during the process.
This is an extremely easy process,
and I'm gonna get started showing you how to do it.
So obviously, we have the light pre masked off
with our masking tape here.
This is a process that we highly recommend.
Even though it is a wipe and not a spray,
you're still gonna be using sandpaper,
and if the ceramic coating were to get on a painted surface,
you want to wipe it off immediately so that it does not dry.
So this just prevents us
from having to worry about any of that.
Very easy to do.
It takes a couple of minutes,
and most of you likely already have some masking tape
out in your garage or your tool closet.
So now that we have that all masked off,
we also washed this car prior to the video.
The number one step in the instructions
is to ensure you wash the surface
with your favorite car wash soap,
get off any dirt and grime and mildly degrease the surface.
Then the oxidation remover wipe
will take care of the rest of the cleaning from there.
So that's what we're gonna go ahead
and get started with here.
Rip your wipe packet open,
the wipe is prefolded into fourths.
I'm gonna leave it folded,
and we're just gonna start
up and down passes one direction.
I'm gonna use a crosshatch pattern
to alternate and make sure we get consistent coverage.
And then we're just gonna rotate the wipe as we go.
You want to use moderate to firm pressure for this
to ensure you're getting full removal
of as much oxidation as possible.
And you can see the brown in that wipe.
That's all that dead plastic
or oxidized plastic coming off.
So I'm gonna go ahead and fold this to the opposite side
work in the alternate direction.
Again I'm using pretty firm pressure.
I'm not pushing down too hard,
but just enough that it's kind of scrubbing
all of that oxidation off.
Make sure you get the edges thoroughly.
It can be sometimes easy to miss the edges
because of the adjacent paint is usually a little higher
than the edge of the lens,
so make sure you press that down in there and get it.
And then also pay attention to any contours
like what you have here.
These are pretty oxidized, so we're getting a lot
of residue coming off into the oxidation wipe.
Fold it again.
I'm just gonna do one pat,
one more pass over
just to make sure we got really good thorough removal
You can focus at the top of the light.
Depending on your lenses, oftentimes the top half
tends to be more severely oxidized
than the lower half because of UV exposure,
so make sure you're spending more time
on the more oxidized portions of the light.
The solvent will stay wet as you go through this process,
so it makes it easy to slide the wipe over the surface.
And you can see, you know,
we're getting a lot of brown in there.
So I'm not getting really any brown residue coming off
in the liquid anymore,
so it's looking like we've removed the majority
of that oxidation.
Set the wipe aside there,
and I'm just gonna take a dry microfiber
just so we can quickly proceed to the sanding process.
I'm just going to dry this off.
You could just let it evaporate too.
It'll take a couple of minutes,
but for time's sake, for the video,
just dry it right off.
Pretty cool process.
You can actually see it working as you go.
Now that the light's nice and dry,
we'll proceed to the sanding steps.
This is where you grab your bottle of purified water,
and we're gonna take our 1000 grit disc,
again, start with your 1000 grit,
attach to the hook and loop to our contour grip applicator,
and then I'm gonna soak the sanding pad
pretty thoroughly.
These nice foam back pads are really, really nice.
They're much better than just a single sheet
that's not backed at all,
and the foam will actually absorb some of that water
and help keep the surface wet as you go.
And then we're also gonna mist the headlight lens.
As we sand, I'm gonna reapply water to flush the surface
and keep it nice and wet as we go.
So now I'm gonna go in a straight line,
and since the large portion of this lens
is long from top to bottom,
instead of wide from side to side,
I'm gonna use up and down passes
instead of side to side passes,
and I'm gonna keep that consistent
throughout my sanding steps.
So we'll start at the edge.
Light to moderate pressure here,
but you want to use consistent pressure throughout.
You know, don't bear down on one section of the lens
and then
use light pressure on a different section.
You want to make sure you keep that pressure uniform.
And you can see here why masking is beneficial.
You know, the sandpaper is gonna tend to
kind of go outside the lines if you will,
unless you're very careful,
which makes it difficult to get the edges thoroughly.
So having that masking tape just ensures
that I'm not marring up the paint,
so that I'm saving time.
I don't have to come back and polish or anything like that.
I can feel it's kind of getting a little dry,
and you can see this milky runoff.
That's really what you want.
This yellowish runoff is typically old UV coating
that was factory applied
that's being removed.
Once that runoff turns clear,
you know you've got all that old coating off.
So you want to cut through all that
with this thousand grit disc.
So it's gonna take it off the fastest.
If you don't get it off with this step,
and then you proceed to your 2000 grit,
it's just gonna take you longer to get that stuff off.
And to allow full durability of the fresh ceramic coating,
we want to ensure that all of that
old factory applied coating is completely gone.
That's looking good.
That was about five minutes of sanding there.
So go ahead and keep our, keep our water down here.
Gonna set that to the side,
and grab our 2000 grit, proceed with that.
Make sure that's centered on there.
I'm just gonna quickly
wipe all this slurry off the lens.
And you can see as I dry it,
go ahead and show you guys here,
this will be a good example of
kind of how to check your sanding.
Dry it off.
And now I can see I missed a big spot right here.
This is really clear still.
Felt like I was getting that,
but there's a pretty deep contour there.
So I'm gonna go ahead,
swap back to that thousand grit,
and we're just gonna hit that specific spot.
You really can't see those spots until the lens dries,
'cause with the water on there,
it's gonna look, you know, pretty uniform.
So now I'll just come back and spend a little more time
in that little contour there.
It's common with those contours.
Again, it's one benefit of the padded,
the foam backed abrasive is it allows you
to get down there a little more uniformly.
But if you dry the lens and see those spots,
just go back to them, spend a little more time
before you move on.
Hopefully that did it.
Looks like it did.
All right, so now we're ready to proceed to
our 2000 grit.
Take that off for the last time.
Move on to 2000.
Same exact process.
I just want to be very thorough,
and we're gonna do a little bit longer
of a sanding step this time around
to ensure that we fully remove
those thousand grit scratches,
so that when we proceed to 3000 and then apply the coating,
there's no scratches showing through.
The coating's designed to fill, you know,
a 2000 to 3000 grit scratch, typically 3000.
So if there's a thousand grit scratches
that are showing through
because you didn't do enough sanding
with your subsequent steps,
you might see those after applying the coating.
All right, so we're just finishing up our 2000 grit step.
And now we're gonna move on
to the last sanding step with our 3000 grit pad.
Soak that one.
Soak your lens,
and keep on working.
Again, make sure to focus on those edges.
It can be easy to kind of not pay attention to the edges
and then you dry it off and have
clear spots left.
And literally the process through each sanding step
is gonna be very similar.
You're just spending a little more time
as you go up the ladder to each subsequent step.
So you're gonna sand the longest with your 3000 grit.
All right, so we're finishing up our 3000 grit step now,
and we're nearly ready
to move on
to the application of the ceramic coating.
The best part.
All right.
So we got that last pass done.
Go ahead and set the two and 3000 grit aside
so we remember to use those
on the opposite side.
I'm gonna grab a fresh dry towel
and dry this lens and the whole surrounding area off.
When you apply the ceramic coating wipe,
you again want to ensure that there is no moisture
on the lens or the adjacent surfaces
where it could drip onto the lens.
This coating is a moisture cure,
and if there's moisture present,
you may get an inconsistent appearance
upon application,
or shortly after.
Couple of final passes.
That's looking good.
Now we just let it air dry for
10 or 15 seconds as we're preparing our coating wipe.
So again, only one wipe per headlight.
These lights are saturated with,
or these wipes are saturated with more than enough coating
to do even the largest headlight lenses.
This is on the large side of a lens,
so it's a good example of,
you know, what these are capable of covering,
and this will cover easily more than this as well.
What we do, even if you feel like
you have enough coating left
from your first wipe to do your second lens,
we do recommend opening that second wipe
for your second lens
just to ensure there's no contamination,
or the coating hasn't started to cure in the wipe,
and then you apply it potentially tacky on the second side.
So do use both wipes.
You're gonna start down low here,
and we're just gonna evenly wipe this
over the whole lens.
Even motions, I'm not using pressure.
You don't want to squeeze out the coating,
but just nicely uniformly go over that lens.
If you miss any spots, you can do a quick pass
back over.
There's two passes there.
And then allow it to dry.
So this is gonna take about five minutes
until it's dry to the touch.
It's going to be 60 minutes
until it is ready to be exposed to moisture
or driven out in the elements,
and 24 hours until it's ready to be washed or abraded
by a carwash or any similar process.
So ensure that you follow those cure guidelines
to not have any issues with your finish quality.
So we'll let that set up,
but you can already see how clear that has come out now.
Now there are some of those inconsistencies I referenced
on the inside of the lens,
but overall, huge improvement.
I mean, this looks virtually brand new.
We did it with a inexpensive kit
in just about, you know, 15 to 20 minutes worth of time
including the sanding process.
So it's very quick and very effective.
Keep in mind, this is a very durable coating.
It's gonna be semi-permanent to permanent,
and will typically last the life of the vehicle.
For more information on our
ceramic headlight restoration kits,
visit griotsgarage.com,
and as always, have fun in your garage.
(upbeat rock music)