A tutorial on how to clean the headlights like new. Since you you have to register their forums to look at the pictures here is the gist of it.
Remove headlight from the car. And heres the wrinkle, how to take it apart to clean the inside. From the forum,
Quote:
The Unit - Baking, Splitting, Stripping
Place the unit less all removable components in an oven (mine happened to be fan assisted though this isn't necessary!) 8-10 minutes at approx 80 degrees centigrade (176 degrees fahrenheit). Make sure nothing is touching the side of the oven or it will melt. The heat will soften the grey putty for about 2-3 minutes.
I used a butter knife to seperate the casings initially, once you have made a start you can pull the two sections apart with your hands - the clear front and the black back. It is unlikely you can seperate it at the first attempt - keep the oven on and put it back in when the putty solidifies.
I managed to split the unit after the 3rd / 4th try, the putty dries quite quickly hence a number of tries are required (not worth the risk of frying the entire lamp!) It is helpful to have two people here to attack it from both ends.
Be careful of the small black pressure tube on the back, its easy to break off (as I found out)
Good view of the backing case (below). The glass object is the lens which focuses our dipped beams into the ground. Mine was fairly dirty and slightly damaged. You can see the grey putty around the edge, the front and back are joined using a groove with the puttin in-between. The mechanism to the left of the lens seems to be a way of adjusting the beam pattern though I didn't experiment with this
You can see how yellowish the cover was before we started in this pic. Drill attachment to polish interior and exterior using Peek, this saved some time and effort. Others have used dishwasher tablets dissolved in warm water. It is thought that sanding down the cover using fine grit sand paper then polishing also works, but I didn't want to risk damaging the cover. This worked fine.
http://www.toyotaimportsforum.co.uk/...play.php?f=148
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In the picture above, he is using something called Peek, a metal polish. Afterward he used Autoglym, which is a motorcycle polishing product. There are many other similar plastic polishes, Meguiars PlastX, and Mother's Plastic polish are two of them.
According to the tutorial: when clean and polished, the headlights were resealed with clear silicone sealer and reinstalled. No reason to clean off the old putty, it doesnt show and leaving it wont hurt anything.
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