The wonderful headlight debate

I've bee going though the forums and trying to decide on new headlights. My current ones are old and faded. Wanted to get new ones with black instead of chrome. After reading many forums is seems the best way to go would be to retro and do it myself. Unfortunately I don't have the time to take it all apart put in the oven,....ect. Plus my light covers are so faded I don't think they can be cleaned. In the end I'd just like to be able to buy a new set of headlights. Problem is which ones to buy?? They all have good/bad reviews. Just want it to look sick and have similar performance on my black tacoma.

Any suggestions??

Yes I'm new to this site and any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

I'd spend the $25 for a polishing kit before I did anything else. I can't remember the brand of the one I picked up, but it was the type where a pad goes on a drill chuck. I would be suprised if you couldn't make them look like new. I had a basket ball goal fall on mine, which left a long horrible scratch. It came out like it was never even there.

 

I've polished them a couple of times now, and usually after about a month or so the go back to looking ugly. I'll keep polishing them until I find some replacement lights. Going to try to black out the front end.

 

I've been looking around here and some guy does it for about 400-600 dollars. If you want black, you'd have to go for a retrofit.

If you want, you can use some fine sandpaper and apply headlight restoration stuff and buff the headlights. Do some researching first as I'm not completely sure.

 

Went ahead and did the BHLM. Wasn't to hard, only bad thing is now the lenses look worse than before. Tried buffing them with no luck. I hope it clears up and that I didn't do all that work for nothing, and end up having to buy new headlights.

 

You can wet sand the lenses with about 1000 grit or finer (Just make sure when you sand it, to get everything sanded nice and uniform, you might wana use a soft foam sanding blocking, so you don't end up with a bunch of finger scratches), then use a couple of good coats of good quality clear coat over that, they'll be nice and new looking..