Hi,
The clear plastic “lens” that covers the instrument cluster guages on both my son’s 72 and my 73 are streaked / cloudy. I tried Mcguire’s plastic polish which removed minor surface imperfections… but the cloudy streaks are apparently inside the plastic itself. (Not the surface)
Is there any way to clear them up? Or is there aftermarket replacements?
Hi John,
The problem is the design of the lenses. They are slightly concave, and I think this creates visual distortion and a cloudy appearance.
I’ve swapped lenses several times and all of the lenses had the same issue.
My suggestion is clean/polish them as well as possible, and use the brightest dash bulbs you can find. They’ll look OK…
Don Rush at WCCC will have other ideas, perhaps there’s a better repro lens available…
This is my spare lens. It is worse than either of the other two.
The streaking milky looking cloudy stuff is really looking like they are NOT on the surface. Using plastic polish makes the surface imperfections go away, but no change at all on the cloudy stuff
Oh wow, that’s way worse than I thought.
That looks like a defect of materials during manufacturing - I think the only option there is a replacement…
Well… i have 3 clusters with varying degrees of that “stuff” going on.
It’s a puzzler for sure. Was expecting to polish it out… but noooo.
You could try wet sanding it first and then using the plastic polish. I would probably try using 400 or maybe 600 grit paper to sand with.
Randy Goodling
CCOA #95
Randy,
That’s awfully coarse for sanding plastic. 400 or 600 would leave deep sanding scratches that would take ages to polish out.
I’d start with 1500 grit, maybe 2000.
Maybe 400 or 600 would be too course for his project. Maybe not. Without having it in front of me it is hard to say. I have used that grit on multiple plastic pieces over the years with good results.
Randy Goodling
CCOA #95
