Our CR-V is now 13 years old. Far from being worn out, it’s only got 130,000 miles on the engine, and after some careful maintenance, it still looks pretty good. One place its age was showing, however, were the headlights. Our Honda has plastic housings like most other manufacturers, and ours fell victim to the same affliction many others have: they yellowed and fogged over with age. When we drove up to Syracuse for my father’s service earlier this year, part of the journey was at night, and it was frightening how dim the lights had gotten, even with the highbeams on.

Jen has been asking me to get after this for some time, and I did some research for the best possible solution. I bought a 3M kit on Amazon last week, resolving to improve our situation. In about a half an hour, I went from this:

To this:

You can really see the before and after difference in the next picture:

It’s really pretty simple. With a standard drill, you start with a fine sanding pad and go finer and finer until you’re wet-sanding the plastic, and then finally you apply a buffing compound to clean up the plastic. Both lenses took me about an hour in total to finish (I went back and cleaned up the right-hand lens after I took the picture above).