Sunday, October 6, 2019

Corvette Lights

After polishing the headlight lenses on the corvette numerous times, I decided it was finally time to replace them. They were crazing and turning yellow internal to the plastic, so there was no way to to improve their clarity by polishing.


The process for changing the lenses is fairly straight forward. Once removed from the car the headlight assembly is put in an oven to soften the butyl so they can be taken apart. Once the lens is separated from the housing all of the butyl gets removed from the channel on the housing. This was painful and took about 45 minutes to an hour for each assembly.


Once that was complete I added new butyl to the channel, installed the separator to the new lens and squeezed the halves together. Once the old lens was removed it was even more obvious how bad it was. The headlamp on the stool has a new lens installed.


I replaced the lens on the passenger side first and reinstalled it. The pictures below shows how badly the lens on the drivers side was crazed which caused the light to just diffuse inside of the housing versus the passenger side.



While it was all apart I also changed the DRLs to LED switchbacks. Instead of an orange incandescent light they are white when the headlamps are on and orange when they are off.  They flash orange at all times for the turn signals. I also added new D1S HIDs for the low beams and 75 watt H7 high beams.