Things that work – headlight polishing

I’ve been back on land for 8 days now, and am, of course, up to my neck in projects of all kinds. One of my pet peeves is paying good money for what turns out to be junk – just yesterday I returned a junk shoe rack ($40, on sale for $20) to Canadian Tire and a junk iPod dock ($140, on sale for $80) to The Source. I like sales, but I do try to buy the best of whatever it is I’m shopping for, in an often-unsuccessful attempt to avoid the “junk” issue.

Some things that look like possible “gimmicks” do work, though. The acrylic headlights on my Outback were trashed – too many miles on roads with dust, gravel and ice crystals hitting them had left them dull and no doubt with a reduced light quality hitting the road. When I got the front-end bodywork done on the car this Spring I asked about getting the headlights replaced but the price was $660 (!!!) so that didn’t happen. The shop said that they “might” be able to polish them up but didn’t for some reason. I keep seeing ads on The Speed Channel for Meguiars Headlight Restoration Kit but couldn’t find anything locally when I looked a few months ago. I finally found a similar product by 3M and over the weekend put it to work. It actually works! About 45 minutes work saved me over $600 – that’s the sort of ROI I really like to see.

The photos below show the “before” and “after” of the project.