Mercedes-Benz headlamp restoration.

How to repair cloudy headlamps.

Most Mercedes-Benz headlamp lenses from 1996 onwards are plastic or to be more accurate acrylic. Great idea as they no longer crack when a rock flies up and hits them. The down side however is that on cars that spend most of their time outside the headlamp lenses go cloudy.

The reason for this is that being acrylic them will get brittle when exposed to the UV rays from the sun, so they have a UV protective coating on them to stop this. Kind of like us putting sunscreen on when outdoors. It is the breakdown of this UV coating that makes them look cloudy and loose there efficiency for lighting your way after dark.

To repair this correctly there are two solutions, new headlamps as on most  versions you can't buy the lense as a separate part. Or the far more cost effective solution of MB Spares & Service repairing the old ones. 

There are a range of polishes on the market that just attempt to polish these damaged coating, our experience  is that these don't work and in fact damage the lenses. This is explained further below.

The steps to repair the lenses are as follows:

- Remove from vehicle, or tape around surrounding panels.
- Use a cleaner to wash lense. You do not want any dirt on it when you start the next step.
- Use 400 grit wet and dry sandpaper and remove all of the old coating, you will know when you have got down to the acrylic of the lense when you get a white milky residue from sanding.
- Now you need to get rid of the 400 grit sanding marks, so you need to use 800, 1000, 1500 and then 2000 grit paper to get the marks out as you go up each grit size the lense will start to get clearer.
- Then you polish the lense with a fine polish, now it will start to look reasonably clear.
- Then and only then can you reapply the UV coating which will totally restore the lense to look like new.
- Leave to dry for 4 hours and reinstall to vehicle or remove tape.

MB Spares can restore your lenses to look like new. The sanding process will take at least 30 minutes per headlamp, maybe longer on badly affected headlamps. The sprinter headlamps in the pictures to the right took us over 2 hours from start to finish.

If you would like to us to repair your headlamps please contact our service department.