430 Scud carbon headlight surgery/restoration

Here are some cool before and after pics I came across of the last set of F430 headlights I restored. There is a factory hard coating on the inside of the lens that fails and causes the light to get a ugly crazed spotted look. Unlike other lights that can just be polished to get rid of a light film these require the hard coating to be removed from the plastic before polishing. It also is not easy to separate the lenses off the housings without damaging anything, from start to finish this took about 3 days but considering the cost of replacement headlights that will fail again anyway I think it’s worth the time.
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And the after pics...
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Thank you gentlemen.

 

I have done a fair amount of these specific carbon Scud lights and many other F-car headlights and while I can't say what the root problem is 100% I think its pretty obvious from my before and after pics that there is a big problem with the inside hard coating that Valeo used, I am also not sure the people who are speculating things are the same people that are actually the ones that work on these cars for a living and have figured out how to safely open these up and remove the coating without damaging the lens. I will gladly offer up my 2 cents if it helps out, but this is only my opinion. I originally did this for a friend who was going to buy new lights anyway for a car he was going to sell and I wanted to see if I could save him the insane amount of money they were new at the time, technically this is considered a non serviceable item and its not meant to be broken open and messed with.... but where is the fun in that ?

In regards to people saying its the carbon fiber gassing out, guess what ? the insert is not real carbon fiber, its the same plastic that the regular 430 uses (which I have seen non carbon F430 lights do this also) with a carbon overlay. It is then painted over in a matt clear coat which you can see in one of my pictures with the lens removed, if the carbon overlay was gassing out it I would suspect the matt clear would be delaminating off the carbon housing as a result which it is not ever. Also I never have had to polish the headlight projector lens or the amber lens due to it having any film on them, its always just the coating on the main lens. The only thing that is suspect is that the crazing is contained to the area that the insert sits around. This is also the only area that gets exposed to direct sunlight and is lit up by the projector headlight which gives off a good amount of heat so that ads a couple other theories to the mix.

I have heard of people not removing the coating completely or just heating it with a heat gun on the car, which is basically temporarily melting it to not look so bad. I highly recommend not doing this as it starts to etch the craze pattern into the polycarbonate lens, and one of the most difficult ones I restored had been getting the heat gun treatment. I have also seen the magnet trick on other F-car lights online, that will not work here, maybe on a 360 with a tiny area of haze since they do not have a hard coat on the inside of the lens. I think the only way to not have the issue is to not have the factory coating in there period.

Another thing to point out is looking at my after pictures, they are taken in the middle of the day in direct sunlight, or inside with my extremely bright LED drop light shining in the headlight which you can see in the reflections. They look very clear. The plastic is extremely soft and the softest microfiber and best polish will scratch the lens. I have seen ones in person that someone else had done in the past and it looked very scratched and scuffed up under direct light. This was something I struggled with at first since stripping the hard coat off itself without damaging the plastic was tricky. So what might look good in some lower light pics probably look way different in daylight or with the headlights on.

 

I believe the first time I did a set of Scud lights was about 4 years ago, that's interesting that Premier said that, I am not familiar with how they were restoring them but once the coating is completely removed there is nothing left to fail or come back on the lens. I would be happy to take a look at them if you want to PM me a couple pics. I will try to look through some of my older pics to show the coating in the process of getting stripped off, the area its been fully removed is crystal clear.

 

PM'ed