I saw a sticky post by joshp14 over on the FAQ board about polishing your tail lights. He mentioned that he used 400 grit sandpaper to wet sand the lenses followed by machine buffing.

While I suppose that would work, it requires some fairly aggressive buffing compound to remove the scratches from the sand paper, which is risky unless you really know how to use a buffer. You could burn or score the lenses from staying in one place a moment to long.

A better way is to use much finer grades of sandpaper. If your lenses are in good shape, start off with 1000 grit (800 grit if they have some deeper scratches) and wet sand the entire lens housing very thouroughly. Switch to 1500 grit and repeat. Finish with 2000 grit. You should spend 20 minutes sanding with each grit for a total of about 1 hour. You will now have a lens that is very soft and smooth. You can then machine buff with a foam pad and a fine polishing compund. I use the NicSand kit from AutoZone, which comes with the foam wheel (mounts in a 3/8 drill) and fine compound.

This method will give a glass like shine with virtually no chance of damaging your housings from aggressive polishing.

This method also works very well for removing pits and scratches on the newer style reflector headlight housings found on newer cars.

 

MOTHERS plastic polish!!

 

Meguires plastic polish! Used it a few weeks ago and my taiollights look as good as new. Sol I would recommend that.

 

tagging this topic for later, thanks for the advice

 

Mine didn't have any real scratches, just swirls that made them look dull. I accidentally hit them with my Craftsman polisher and Meguire's #7 Glaze when doing the car, and decided to just try it on the whole light. They came out looking brand new.

Hopefully someone who doesn't need to do a full polish job will find that useful.