Yellow Headlights

Recently read up a post in Lifehacker, a solution to clean yellow headlights. Their recommendation - denatured alcohol. After a few weeks, I decided to give it a try. The version of the alcohol I found was white spirit. The kind they use for painting. Can be purchased from any hardware shop. Cheap.

Next part is cleaning. This involves A LOT of elbow grease. As usual, test on a small area before working on a large area just in case there are some unwanted reaction.

Make sure you have plenty of rags and rubber gloves (if possible). Why gloves? Cause spirit will drain the moisture and oil from your hands faster than you can clean the headlights. SAFETY FIRST.

When you first apply spirit on the area, rubbing it off will give it a cloudy look after the spirit evaporates. Keep this up with a clean rag repeatedly until there is no more cloudiness. At times this will take a LONG TIME and A LOT of effort. It all depends on how bad those lights are.

Most headlights nowadays are made from polycarbonate. Some might know it by its commercial name Lexan. According to a spec sheet from GE, white spirit and isopropyl alcohol (IPA) are ok to use for cleaning polycarbonate.

I've tried a lot of stuff for yellow lights.... still waiting to see how long will this last until my arm has to go for extra training again.

Also at the same time I'm trying some polishing/rubbing compound to see if i can get better results. Some of you may have read about wet sanding method. I've not tried that yet.

Links and pictures later when I have time.

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Update 12/12/12: The IPA solution works to keep the yellow away about a month. Recently I had my car repainted and they polished and lacquered my headlamps. Slightly better than before. As the car wash applies their cheap wax on the lights when the do the car, that turns yellow quickly.

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Update 3 April 2012: Car already sold but just wanted to comment on headlights, the lacquer that Ah Huat (from the paint shop) applied had been peeling off. So much for its proclaimed high quality lacquer. Proper sanding does keep it sparkly much longer.