today we're going to go over how to polish Plastics that are meant to look like glass you know polycarbonates plexiglass lexan all those things things for safety glasses things for face Shields all the scratches on the windshield of your ATV motorcycle snowmobile windscreen the plastic gauge cluster in a car maybe even your tachometer the plastic there here's a plastic like wide view mirror that I use in my motorhome that I polished up that was completely scratched not anymore here's a little protective screen cover for my welder I can just polish that up make that Crystal Clear again so if it's clear and plastic and you're meant to see through it I'm going to show you how to polish it up so you can see through it again so the first thing we're going to need is some buffing wheels and I'll put links Down Below on everything that I use in this video what I use is not absolutely what you have to get you know you can use a bench grinder to spin the buffing wheel you could use a drill mounted upside down on a vise you could use a drill you just hold in your hand buffing wheels come in all different sizes kind of you know depending on what tool you're going to use I'm actually going to use this variable speed this isn't just an angle grinder it's actually meant to polish you know paint on cars and stuff like that but I set it up to polish mainly aluminum but we use this for here so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to take this I'm going to mount this in my vise just so this is the exact same thing as a bench grinder it's just I already have this set up so that's it RPMs that I run generally I run around 32500 on this machine the bigger the wheel the more surface area the extra faster this is moving a drill only spins around 2000 RPM maybe you can find a corded one that spins around 3000 RPM but this is a smaller surface area so this actually moves a lot slower it just takes longer so the bigger disc you have the faster it moves if you have something like a bench grinder with something around a you know a six inch disc they'll spin at 3 600 RPM so that's going to be pretty close to what this is spinning with this bigger you know eight inch disc so bench grinder speed about 3600 RPM for this bigger disc on my setup my spin I think I'm actually set at 2600 RPM but we can do 3000 doesn't really matter you just have to be careful and I'll show you that in a second so anytime you're polishing something on a polishing wheel you need a polishing compound and the best I found for Plastics is Tripoli Tripoli kri p-o-l-i you can buy in little things it's always this reddish brown sometimes it's actually a darker brown but it's always this reddish brown color for the most part I buy it in a big old stick you don't have to buy it in a big old stick you can buy it in things this small you can buy it even smaller in this it's actually pretty cheap I think this one pound block cost me 10 bucks something like that and it lasts forever you'll go through a lot of stuff this is also consequently the exact same stuff you use to polish aluminum so if you ever want to polish aluminum you can also do that with this exact same setup as you do your polycarbonates okay I have some pretty bad safety glasses here and we're just going to polish up real fast because those give you the best view so this one's brand new of course and these are what you're looking through and other things um you can see how bad that is maybe I'll put a piece of tape across half just so you can see but let's uh polish those up really fast I'll show you how quick and easy it is piece of tape across it start it up just put a little bit of compound on doesn't take much especially something this small foreign [Applause] I can work with that just a little bit longer get a little better but let's just see if that shows a good transitional difference between good and bad we still need to do the inside a little bit because the inside gets scuffed up fair amount too but that's all it is work that out and I'll just polish out all the way up so you're saying to yourself yeah but safety glasses are super cheap yeah but it's not cheap just to run to the store if you already have this stuff for polishing aluminum and stuff like that something like my face mask I have polished this thing right here probably pushing 20 times and every time it didn't need it but I probably would have replaced it seven of those times you know so 7 times 20 times 30 you know we're talking 200 that this saves you from doing this I'll just polish the rest of this up real fast the only trick I can tell you is don't sit in one spot forever because you will if you heat up the plastic if you get it hot you'll melt it but we'll do a little bit of a time lapse speed it up and I'll just polish the rest of this out inside outside uh you'll notice that I'm just I'm doing one side and in the next and then different angles because I'm just trying not to if you've ever used trying a lot to let it grab because it'll rip right out of your fingers [Applause] [Music] foreign how long that took me but done same thing you know a bigger surface area it actually doesn't take much longer to do an entire face shield it really doesn't now you can do things like um tinted safety glasses or you know these yellow and these actually safety sunglasses I will say with sunglasses though a lot of times they put a UV coating over it and so they actually paint there's actually a clear paint that reflects UV light and if it has that this will polish it but if the UV coating is chipped you'll break through it a little bit and it's never going to be perfect but it can be done like these ones are these are super old I just barely did I just barely did this lens you can see this one actually had paint over spray on it so I mean he cleaned it up and that is 90 percent as good as new this one you can this one there's no UV coating on it so it'll look just like new um I will say playing around doing it this way I can get they look 95 97 as good as new I don't spend I could spend more time and probably get them to a hundred but that last little five percent is really meticulous and I actually don't know if you could actually do it with this uh you might actually have to get a softer wheel a different polish but this gets a 95 and it takes seconds and you're done how hard do I push um I actually pushed would probably a pound two pounds on this this is actually a hard wheel you can actually get softer Wheels this one's a way softer one will give a little bit better polish but is it worth my time this is already set up you know I'm just trying to make my safety glasses be clear so I will wear them otherwise I'm just going to squint and use my eyelashes as safety safety nets to catch all the debris and that's not the best for you anyway once I see all the you know I got all the scuffs and scratches out at the very last little bit I'm just barely rubbing it across the surface where these fine Little Fibers are so fibers are so it's just working as a super fine pad so push a little bit harder at the beginning to get all your all your marks out and lighten it up lighten it up lighten it up kind of a a hack of how to get by with just one wheel instead of buying multiple Wheels otherwise you buy multiple you buy a hard one and then you'd use a medium one and then you'd use a super soft one to get the same results and this is kind of just hey I got one wheel I just want to get this done done here's a plastic mirror this is a piece of plastic used as a this is actually a side view replacement mirror thing I'm sure plastic mirrors everything's replacing glass are you can just see polished outside that side was unpolished and you see just how bad it was and this is literally like 10 seconds and you can actually see through it now if I was doing like the windshield of a ATV UTV or something like that side-by-side snowmobile I definitely want something big like this you definitely want a big wheel like this and no you cannot run this on an angle grinder unfortunately these cannot handle the RPM of an angle grinder they just spin way too fast and again this Tripoli is the exact same stuff you would use to polish aluminum so if you've ever thought about polishing brass or aluminum or something like that this is the first step and this usually gets you 90 to 95 percent reflective finish like it looks amazing you don't even know it looks perfectly done that lasts five to ten percent you can do with other polishes um but that's actually way more work than it's sometimes even worse worth usually it's just this first 90 and it looks amazing if you want to do rims or something else like that but thanks for watching guys have a good one bye okay these are all polished up leave them stay you're watching stay ready good job you fell off that's okay okay these ones are not polished here drop it drop it okay these are not polished can you can't see as good right yeah let's see if this would be danger this is okay leave it stay this is a molten slag of Steel coming at your eye you ready Mist see dangerous dirty safety glasses saved your life clean safety glasses would have saved your life it's science guys you look very sophisticated give me five tell everybody goodbye it's right here see him right here where