Scored some beautiful tail lights, lots of cracks but still in one piece. The lens frames are holding everything in place. Is it possible to pour or spray with some kind of clear coat that would continue to hold them together?
I've never tried it, but it seems like this would work....Joe the Fonz here in NJ, told me he would spray crazed/cracked taillight lenses with urethane clear and they would clear up...the urethane remelted the plastic and fused it back together, causing the crazing to disappear. Hey, it couldn't hurt, if the lenses were bad anyway...tell us how it comes out! On the other hand, Vic Collins, who owns the Kopper Kart, made a set of lenses (Frazer?) for Donn Lowe. He made a mold of the old cracked, crazed lenses with materials from Smooth-On. Then he cast up a resin version on the taillight. We used fibergl*** resin, and polyester glaze to fill in missing pieces, and smooth out the cracks and such. Next was to make a mold of the repaired lense. Then pop out new lenses with clear resin, with Red tint from Smooth-On. If I remember correctly, the "real" lense part took a lot of time, you need to be very careful and I think he had to preheat the mold, and post heat the lense after casting? anyway, Smooth-On would give you the details if you use their materials. It's pretty time and money intensive to do this, so it's only recommended if you can't get the lenses anywhere else!
thanks for the advice, the lights came from a 57 merc. I know they could be found but I am trying save some dough.
I've sprayed clear on the backside of plastic lenses and it did help. It is not going to fix big cracks and if you say you need to keep them together I don't think it will work. But for hairline cracks it seeps in and fills them in. Make sure it is perfectly clean first though or you've just encased any dirt on there forever.
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