Polywatch

Many of you may have heard of this substance - it's used to polish scratches out of plastic watch crystals. All my current watches (at least those I wear regularly) have sapphire crystals, but when I ordered some watchmaking materials the last time, I wanted to get some of this to try on something other than watches.

My BMW 540i is equipped with plastic lenses over the headlights (my wife's 325xi has them too, but hers are in better shape since her car is much newer), and over time these become pitted and somewhat cloudy, so I thought I would try the Polywatch on those. Here is what I started with:



The scratches and pits are pretty evident, especially when using a flash. So, out came the cotton balls (cotton wool) and I went to work with the Polywatch. I could see results immediately, and stopped to snap this picture that highlights the area I've done. You can clearly see that the haze is reduced where I've been working at it:



So, I carried on, and did both sides, and they look much improved. There are still pits and some haze, as I think the Polywatch is probably not aggressive enough to clean this in one go, so I may do this a few more times to see if I can get it better, but as this shot shows it's a good improvement from where I started:



If any of you have similar issues on your cars, you might want to give this stuff a try. I'm pretty happy with the result so far.