I went to the store this afternoon.All those dozens and dozens of vehicles I saw with those fogged up plastic headlight lenses.My old clunkers don't have plastic lenses.Genuine glass lenses for me.Even with that dust on my glass lenses, they still look brand new. cuhulin
snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@storefull-3171.bay.webtv.net:
Yup. My niece said she tried one of those kits (I've mentioned her headlights several times, so I don't know if she just made it up or not) and got nowhere.
Has anyone here tried them? It seems to me there's no reason why they wouldn't, so long as you went down in abrasion.
I have some 3M Microfinish. I take that and rub it in until it starts to get dry and gritty, and then I buff it with a buffing wheel. Works pretty good, and since I already have 2/3 of a quart, it costs me nothing.
I would imagine a $5 tin of "polishing compound" would work about the same.
snipped-for-privacy@webtv.net wrote in news:15166-4C802F98-6394@storefull-
3171.bay.webtv.net:
Not "progress", but NHTSA safety regulations.
It seems that the safety nuts are afraid that pedestrians clobbered by your ride may get sliced by headlight-glass fragments, so they mandated plastic lenses.
I tried one of the kits on the '96 I30. Took a lot of elbow grease and it was marginally better, but 6 months later it was right back to the same thing. There's got to be a better way.
As far as I know plastic was never mandated in the US. Plastic shards can slice as well as glass can, especially at the forces involved in such an example.
The US has a rather cruddy headlamp regulations that shape what we get on the cars.
I didn't use a kit, just paint stuff I had on hand and it worked great. But as time went the interval got shorter and shorter. Eventually I just bought some replacement lamps.
Headlights are now a maintenace item along with other parts of the car.. brake lines fail quite often now too.. I bet you still have your original lines on your '80's van Cuhulin.. Now brake lines are failing at 5-10 years old.
Car manufactures are doing this on purpose. It forces you to keep buying their products.
As far as I think I know, all of my vehicles still have their original factory installed brake lines.My 1914 Ford Model T is a whole nother story though.
Back in the 1970's, I traded my second hand/used 1967 Ford pickup truck in on a big old 1954 one ton Ford truck.One morning when I started that
1954 Ford truck up to go to work, the brake pedal went all the way to the floor board.The right rear brake line had rusted out. Rust Never Sleeps. cuhulin
Brent wrote in news:i5ra0o$ntb$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:
It appears you are right. I was taking someone else at face-value; a mistake, apparently.
The actual text of the latest FMVSS 108 I can find (2004, link above) does not mention anything about a prohibition on glass lenses, but it does specify that glass lenses do not need to meet the abrasion standards that plastic lenses are required to satisfy.
After some actual thought, I now suspect that plastic was chosen for three reasons:
1) easier to mold into the fancy and complex shapes now demanded by the designers,
2) much lighter than glass, which goes towards helping the manufacturers meet CAFE regulations, and
3) cheaper to make than glass.
Probably numbers one and two are the most dominant.
So I'm told. There is certainly a hell of a lot of terribly annoying glare with modern headlamps. Not all of that is due to my aging eyes, I'm sure.
Tegger wrote in news:Xns9DE8C771DC481tegger@208.90.168.18:
No, it isn't. I *always* go outside wearing a hat after sunset for just that reason. I tilt my head and I don't get the lights in my eyes. Bloody annoying. It's almost impossible to tell now if someone has their high beams on.
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