Resurface tail lights?
 

Bought a pair of used Valenti's that have minor surface scratches as expected. What would be the best way to resurface these? Wet sand and clear or what?

It really depends how deep the scratches are. But yeah wet sand and a nice thick coat of clear coat to help mask the scratches. Then polish away. If you can't notice them from 2-3 feet away no one else would either.

I agree with @Mr.ac but wet sanding would be a last resort, for really deep scratches and/or oxidization. If the scratches are surface level only, and don't go too deep, you can try something like PlasticX to hide them.

I think its a good assumption that the thickness in plastic between headlights and tail lights varies a lot. I don't mind wet sanding headlights because the plastic would be a lot thicker since they are subject to impact from stones and debris from the road. But tail lights I would imagine use a thinner plastic than the headlights. The less sanding done on them the better.

Sanding is only for major damage. I'd use plastic polishes until they're gone.


Same with any polishing, use the least aggressive fix first and work up to more aggressive if it doesn't work.

You could either use like a 3 stage plastic scratch remover/polishing combo or go for wet sanding and depending on how deep the scratches are, choose the lowest (but the highest )grit to to start. Pretty common to start with 800grit and then follow in succession with 1000, 1200, 1500, 2000, 3000 and so on. You can skip some of the grit levels but you'll have to work harder to fine tune the end reaults. You also don't want to be concentrating on localized areas (ie:the scratch) you need to work the entire area and the surrounding area equally and taper off carefully if you really don't want to do the whole surface. You should be, I believe, alternating horizontal and vertical strokes when you move up a step in the grit of paper. No circular or random buffing. Wet the paper throughly, let it soak for 10 mins or so first and don't let it or the plastic dry while sanding. The finer grits get sludged up pretty quickly but you can extend the use of each sheet of sandpaper by rinsing the sheet every so often. Wiping off the surface of plastic helps too (and you can see your progress or areas that you may have not been getting as evenly as the rest), but remember to re-wet the plastic surface before starting again. I personally choose to go for wetsanding from the get go because nothing is worse putting all the polishing anf buffering work into sonething only to see that it isn't satisfactory. The polishing and buffering compounds for plastics are in essence the same as wetsanding but with ridiculously minute "grits". So imagine starting with 20,000 grit paper and think how long that would take to even see progress. I have only gone that high on model cars but I feel like I may as well use a satin cloth because it's that fine. I'd say try your hand at wetsanding something acrylic and see if you feel up for it. Whatever you do with sandpaper can be fixed basically by finer sandpaper. Unless you sand a hole right through a part of the plastic...you can't really create something non restorable

NTHEBRZ

i did the same thing, bought valentis super cheap that had a pretty big scratch on one side because previous owner was in an accent. i took a orbital buffer on a medium speed and used plstix polish and the scratches went away instantly. i polished both tails and then applied a coat of wax and 6 months later they are still in brand new condition

Never sand the lenses, the UV coating will scratch off and they will get yellow very soon...

I think there are polishes and semi permanent protective treatments out there. 22ple makes one I think for plastic.

NTHEBRZ