Fightman's Tail light tinting project

Alright, so I had this in my build thread, but figured I'd post it here, for anyone who wanted to see a detailed writeup with some pics, on how to properly tint tail lights with VHT Night Shades.

I got my info from another user here.... forget his name... but it was a sweet writeup. I just added extra pics, and a little more detail to my text.

Let's start working on Smoking some tail lights:



Here's a pic of the stock lens on it's own:



The first thing I did was sand down the lens, to promote a good adhesion surface for the VHT, and ensure the lens was smooth. I wet sanded the lenses, using 800 grit, then 1000, and finally 2000 grit sandpaper.



Next thing I did was spray the lenses with the VHT Night Shades. The trick here, is to keep your can approx. 7" from your project, to minimize spotting. I waited 30 minutes between coats.



Here's a pic with 3 coats of VHT on:



Then I applied 7 coats of Krylon Clear Coat paint for added durability and to aid in the next, very extensive part of the project.



These look pretty good, however, not having a paint booth, I managed to get some little fuzzies here and there embedded into the paint.



After the Clear coat had been given plenty of time to dry (approx. 2 hours), it was time to wet sand again. This step was painfully long, but enabled me to get rid of all the surface imperfections, caused by the lint hairs and such. Again, I used 800, 1000, and finally 2000 grit paper



Here's a pic of the lenses wet sanded:



The next thing I did was use Turtle Wax Polishing Compound. This was used to get some of the haze created by the wet sanding out.



After using the compound, the lenses was noticeably clearer looking, but still had some find scratches. I then used some Meguiar's ScratchX to polish out the remainder of the the scratches, and used a sponge to apply the product, and then the dry side of the sponge to polish it out.



Here's a comparison of one lense only wet sanded, the other rubbed out with the compound and then polished with the ScratchX"



Ready for installation:



And a couple of shots with them installed:





Also tinted the 3rd brake light.

Overall, a long and exhausting project! lol! I started on it in the morning around 10am, and finished around 12:30am! (took a 2 hour break to watch "Safe" with Jason Statham... lol). I'm pretty happy with the results, and for approx. $30.00 invested... the pink lenses are gone... and the truck looks alot better!