LET THERE BE LIGHT
The cloudy headlights plaguing night-time vision whenever Editor Furr took his 997 Carrera 4S out for drive after dark are finally a thing of the past...
Candles for headlights. This is the best way of describing the effectiveness of my 997’s night-time illumination, which was heavily compromised as a consequence of yellowing light lenses. The bumper-located indicator and sidelight lenses were suffering from the same problem, as well as pitted surfaces, inhibiting the ability of their bulbs to adequately illuminate the road ahead. It seemed as though only full beam would penetrate the ugly discolouration.
This is a common problem experienced by owners of cars making use of plastic headlight lenses, which in the case of Porsche, means pretty much every model since discontinuation of air-cooled 911s. An extreme and very costly solution is to replace the affected lights with new units. At the other end of the price spectrum resides a range of DIY headlight correction kits from a variety of detailing product manufacturers. I’ve used one or two of these in the past, but they seem to serve only as a temporary fix — they lack the coatings required for long-lasting protection. With this in mind, I took advice from members of the excellent 997 Carrera Owners UK Facebook group and contacted Headlight Sparkle (headlightsparkle.com), a mobile headlight restoration company covering Greater London, Essex, Kent and Hertfordshire.
I arranged to meet Headlight Sparkle owner, Ash, at Birchanger Services near Stansted on the M11. During the two hours I was in his company, he cleaned/prepared the affected light lenses and painstakingly brought them back to a condition good as new by way of wet sanding and high-rpm machine polishing (with a compound many jewellers use for polishing diamonds). With the headlights and indicator lenses returned to full clarity, he then proceeded to apply a Gyeon high-quality ceramic crystal nanocoating for protection against ultraviolet light, extremes of temperature and scratching.
The results speak for themselves. Indeed, illumination of the road ahead is now fully restored. In fact, I didn’t realise just how poor the car’s exterior lighting was until I returned to driving in the dark. Excellent work, Ash! ●