How best to restore the plastic tail light housing in the trunk

[NZCSi]

Hi There,

I've searched but haven't found anything on restoring the plastic tail light housing in the trunk - sorry if this is already explained somewhere.

My plastic tail light housings are fairly beat up with deeper scratches/chunks taken out in some areas.

Questions:
- Will a good clean, prime and paint last in that area of the trunk?
- Or are there better plastic restoration techniques?
- Is there a way to repair deeper scratches/chunks out of the plastic?
- Is the red plastic on the reflector side supposed to be chrome?
- Do people just re-paint the reflectors (metal ones as well) with chrome paint?

Any good/bad experiences or pointers in the right direction would be much appreciated.

Cheers

Ben

 

[deQuincey]

i may have a solution, i sent you a pm

 

[Stan]

several on eBay....

 

[NZCSi]

Thanks guys, was hoping to restore what I have - so does that mean it's not really possible?

Guess that's the situation with plastic huh?

 

[Stan]

thorough cleaning, light fine sanding, clean then mask off the metal parts and paint with SEM Warm Gray. For the inside, clean, sand off any rust, clean, then recover the reflectors with a shiny aluminum tape that can be found in hardware stores

 

[Peter Coomaraswamy]

Takes some time

I posted some before and after pictures here. I did pretty much as stated below, you can drill out the rivits and take the entire assembly apart, clean and paint- I used a grey that I had around, but you can get closer to original if you look harder than I did. I also used the chrome paint rather than the tape. People seem to like the tape though so whatever you like. You can get them to come out nice looking and it only costs a few bucks.

 

[NZCSi]

Thanks guys, if you drill out the rivets, do you just use a normal rivets for reassembly? I haven't seen those before - kind of dome-like on one side and like a nail head on the other?

 

[Peter Coomaraswamy]

regular rivits work fine

 

[NZCSi]

Cheers

 

[2ma2]

You car carefully apply silver oven foil using contact adhesive, it will wrinkle a little in the curved areas but its not vissible at the end. More reflective than paint imo