Originally Posted by
Caffeine Fiend
Thanks Guys. It does go to show that a reasonable result can still be achieved without a full correction. Which is the main reason I did this write up really.
Funnily enough, you'd think that there would have been less time involved, considering that a full correction wasn't done. In fact I still ended up spending about 12 hrs on it. Mainly owing to the fact that it had obviously been years since it had received any sort of decent rejuvenation. The exhaust pipes alone took around an hour of polishing due to the crud that was quite literally etched into the metal, almost like rust.
Hopefully the new owner won't let it get back to the way it was. I did say to him though that as far as the paint is concerned, if he wanted to ever see a truly corrected surface, it would need a respray. There's just not enough to work with anymore without seriously compromising the long term protection of the clear coat.
Brad, in answer to your question, there are headlight restoration kits you can buy for your power drill, however they are of a basic quality level, mainly because you sometimes need the forced rotation abilities of a rotary polisher to be able to get a truly clear finish.
You can still get a reasonable level of correction though.
There are also kits that include sandpaper for you to use by hand instead of any sort of machine polishing. I don't generally like these as I feel they don't tend to finish down well enough. There still invariably ends up being sanding marks that aren't able to be removed by hand, even using the 2nd stage polish many include.
This is a personal opinion based on how hard I know it is to remove sanding marks with anything other than a machine.