IndeedWelly wrote:Nice little restoration there Waxy, I have witnessed that it is the angle of the headlight towards the sun which determines which motors are effected. The 406's headlights have an almost vertical face and don't 'see' as much sunlight as these cars with 'raked' headlight designs.
the angles do play a part, i.e Matiz, Micra's the fading is quite severe, lesser but coming up behind are the lights with angles similar to earlier model Focus, Astra, Clio, Passat etc. - early BMW's suffer as well. Even a few more Golfs around 07 plate are starting to suffer. - It's the top area of the lights in most cases that look damaged then it starts to spread down the lens.Once they start going it's annoying to the owner as they can have a clean car but always end up with the lamps looking yellow.
Recently the stuff I have been working on are MOT failures. The fading/UV damage affects the beam pattern/spread from the lights causing a non defined beam but a fuzzy one which cannot be read. - So you can imagine at night on a country lane how non-effective and pretty serious this could be. - The Passat lights above for example had failed an MOT because of light pattern - a very annoying 'fail' for any owner. Their car could be in great condition and fail on beam pattern which is something that they have probably overlooked when doing their own 'pre-mot' checklist checks etc.
For albeit a pretty straightforward restoration that in most cases takes only around an hour for both lights. It's how they are UV protected afterwards that's important. - Most of the DIY hand kits are fairly useless, i.e they work but only to a degree - and offer no protection product to seal.
