Testing Meguiar's Two Step Headlight Restoration Kit!

by Mike Kojima

Any car that has the newer plastic headlights will experience weathering and yellowing eventually. This is caused by UV light exposure degrading the protective coating on the surface of the lights. Once the coating is eroded, UV light makes quick work of the clear plastic underneath, and the light becomes cloudy and yellow.

There are many headlight restoration products on the market, including some excellent ones by Meguiars. However, most of them involve using a drill to spin a buffer wheel to remove the oxidation from the light's surface and then polish the lights to a nice clear shine. Finally, a sealer is usually sprayed on.

Nowadays a lot of people are less mechanically inclined and less technical, so Meguiars wanted to come up with a simpler way to restore headlights that did not need power tools. More people live in apartments with less access to tools. Thus, Meguiars has come up with a simpler two-step headlight restoration process that does away with the need to have a drill or a DA orbital buffer to get results. How does it work? Well, check it out.

Meguiar's Two Step kit consists of two polishing pads that are relatively abrasive and reminiscent of scotchbrite green, a polish and a sealer spray.

The headlights on our project EP3 were a good candidate to test the product on. They were hazed, cloudy and yellowed from neglect. Normally we would have wet sanded something like this, then buffed with a headlight restoration compound on a polishing wheel, but we will try the new Meguiar's two-step process.

After cleaning the lights to make sure they were free of dirt and grip, our FNG, Vince, applies a quarter-sized squirt of the Meguiar's cleaner to the supplied pad.

Vince carefully applied the cleaner to the headlight using a side to side motion. Not wanting to ruin anything, he was careful and only used moderate pressure.

Testing Meguiar’s Two Step Headlight Restoration Kit!