I decided to do a light smoke on the stock tail lights of my BSM LGT Wagon. Figured it would go well with the recently tinted windows (30%), but don't like the look of tint film applied to the tail lights. Besides, i'm not sure that tint film would work too well on the curves of the wagon tail lights. So, I decided to use some VHT NiteShades tinting spray, but I wanted to make sure it looked like part of the tail lights and was cleanly done. Figured I could spray some clear over it and wet sand and buff to a perfect shine. Here's the rundown of the process...
Here's the stock tail lights before I started...
First step was to wet sand the outer lenses with 1000 grit sandpaper to roughen the surface up a little bit and allow the spray tint to "stick" better. I wet sanded each lens till they had a nice, even dullness to them. Here's a pic comparing a wet sanded lens with the non-sanded one (wet sanded one is on the right, obviously)...
And here's both lenses sanded...
After they're both wet sanded evenly, it's time to spray some tint. Here's the VHT Niteshades spray tint I used and the clear...
One of the benefits of using a spray tint is that you can completely control how light or dark you want to make the tint. I didn't want to go too dark...just a light smoke. So, I sprayed 2 light and even coats to get the level of tint I wanted. Here's the 2 lights after 2 coats of NiteShades. (I almost feel like I might have gone a bit darker than I initially wanted, but oh well...)...
After letting the tint dry completely (next day), it was time to spray some clear to seal it all up. In order to get the clear to stick better, I again wet sanded the tint layer very lightly with 1500 grit sandpaper making sure to keep it very even. Here's the lights after this sanding...
Then it was time to spray some clear. I layed down 3 coats of clear, with the 3rd coat a bit thicker than the 1st two in an attempt to minimize the orange peel. The Duplicolor Acrylic clear I used had a tendency to turn cloudy right after it was sprayed, which made me a little nervous at first, but luckily it cleared out once it cured. Here's the cloudiness right after spraying the clear...
Even though I sprayed the last coat of clear thicker, it still left a lot of orange peel...kinda inevitable with most spray cans. In this closeup, you can clearly see the orange peel texture in the clear...
To get rid of the texture, it was back to wet sanding. First with some 1000 grit to cut through most of the texture, then finally with some 2000 grit to get the finish I wanted. Here's one of the lights after the final 2000 grit wet sanding session...
To finish them off, I used some terry applicators and polishing compound to bring out the shine in the clear. After several applications of compound and buffing, here's what I ended up with...
And once close up so you can better see the finish. The orange peel texture is gone and you can see it in the reflection of my daughter's blue and green booster seat...
Unfortunately, by the time I finished up, it was already late and dark out so i'll install them and take some installed pics tomorrow. Stay tuned...
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