Gauge Plastic Restoration

Instrument panels, plastic lenses, and the gauge covers, usually tend to get scratched up. What happens to get little dust in the interior, and people grab whatever, and they clean off the dust on their, their dash. However, it often leaves a lot of little scratches. And in the case of our 57 here, we've got enough little scratches in this clear plastic, that we're going to have to do some work on this, to really bring it back. As you can see, we've got, you know, some places where clearly it looks like it's been wiped, and some places where it's been scratched a little bit.

So usually, you know, these can come back quite easily, and 99% of the time all of the scratches, are on the front of this plastic. And it's just a matter of treating it, like you would like a, like a paint job itself, and we'll use a lot of the same principles, you do use to buff out a car, is to get this plastic looking clear and bright again. So to start, we'll be using a piece of foam. What I like about the foam is it holds onto the plastic, so when we're buffing on it, doesn't slide around on the table, and it won't scratch it, and it gives us a nice area to work on. We'll be using some 2000 grit.

Some guys even like to go a little finer than that, but I've found that 2000 work just fine, for cleaning up the plastic. And we use a wet or dry paper and a block. It's important to use a block, as opposed to your finger, because your fingers will kind of find grooves, and start to alter the shape of the plastic. Where if we use a block, it provides a consistently smooth, layer in which to, sand the surface with. This was scratched up a little bit more on this end.

So work that edge a little bit more than the other. Generally, when I'm working on plastic like this, I like to work one side at a time. That way I'm not trying to figure out, which side I've sanded on, and which side is still foggy, or which side needs more work. I can just kind of, get one side, so it's really good. And I know that's the side that I'm working on, and then flip it over and work on the reverse side.

And it doesn't really take a lot, to move a lot of material on this. You can kind of see the milky color of this water, and that's purely caused by, removing plastic. Now, if you look at it, the whole thing has kind of taken a fuzzy, sort of milky appearance. Kind of check if we do find that, you know, there's like a scratch, or something that we didn't get sanded out, we can always come back, and sand some more to remove those. To polish this then, I'll use a foam pad, and a three inch polisher.

Three inches more of a size that's manageable. You know, I wouldn't grab a big eight inch polisher, on something like this because it, it would have a tendency to want to, shoot my parts all over the place. This is a nice size. They do actually make some polishers, that are even smaller than this. And that may be good for small things, like instrument panel parts.

We're going to start out with a, with a mild buffing compound. Okay, once we get some of that on the pad, we'll put some on the plastic as well. Probably a little heavy there, that's all right. Okay, as you can see immediately, this has gotten a lot clearer. It it's removed a lot of the scratches, but once we really look at this close, you see some little black spots, and stuff like this is actually picked up, from surrounding the instrument panel, and what we're going to do now is, we're going to go back in, and because this is actually touching, a metal bezel in the back, it kind of transferred some of the paint, and it left a few small indents here.

So we're going to also sand, and polish the backside as well. As you can see, we've gone from a piece of plastic, that was well scratched up, it really showed its age. And with just a little bit of elbow grease, you know, a little bit of time, we were able to restore this to like new condition. Finally, there's like one other thing we can do, help clean these up in, in a lot of cases you'll notice, where the paint in the numbers is starting to fall off, and flake out of the grooves, and the way around that, to really work with that is to, simply, take some acrylic white artists paint, and you don't need to buy the real spendy stuff. This stuff is all usually protected, from the lens on the backside, and you want to make sure you have the grooves clean, so you don't have buffing compound in there.

And it's just a matter of going in, and I saw on this one where it was, and it's, it's not rocket science here. We'll just go in and fill this grove, and on some guys will actually go in, and, you know, color match their numbers on their gauges, to their car and stuff like that. It's easy enough to do go in with like a plastic toothpick, or something and scrape up the old paint, and replace it with the color you want. But if you're true restoration, just go in, and kind of fill that up with the paint you want, and you don't want to use, and I'll use a micro fiber towel to clean this up, but you don't want to use this real lofty side. You want kind of a tight, cause we don't want to go into the groove, and actually clean it out.

We just want to wipe away, what's on top. And because it's acrylic, it's not going to dissolve the plastic, or eat into the plastic. If you know, you get it all wiped off, and you don't still want to get some other area better, it, it's just a pride, you know, some guys will go in and use enamel paints here. Enamel paints will require you to because it will actually, dig into the plastic a little bit. You actually ended up needing to sand the surface, and rebuff the backside, but if you just use acrylics, it gets the job done in no time, and it looks very nice.

And there it is with a little bit effort, you can restore the instrument panels, plastics on your car, and it's really not all that labor intensive, and the results speak for themselves.