I know there are one or two products about for doing this but is there a totally DIY way of doing it, i.e. is it possible with materials etc. that I'm likely to have already?
I know basically what one needs is a *very* fine abrasive followed by polishing - or even just polishing as that is just the next level of fineness really. But what polishes etc. have I already got which might work on plastic lenses? Would something like T-Cut be too fierce?
I have heard that Brasso works. But wait for some other responses before starting.
Wave goodbye to any anti-reflective coatings the lenses have.
The message from Rod contains these words:
Brasso, or jewellers' rouge - which probably isn't all that readily available. It will affect any coatings on the lens, though.
Yes. Try toothpaste. But, as another has said, this will lose any optical coating.
I have most of the equipment to do this, including abrasive cloths that go from about 100 grit to 5000 grit and the final polish, but what I don't have is the intermediate polish.
The only problem with removing scratches is that you have to be very careful not to alter the optical properties of the lens. Concentrate on one particular scratch and the lens is ruined.
In the aerospace industry, canopy and windscreen polishing is quite normal and the rubbing down has to be blended in in as wide an area as possible. But to test the job after, one man holds a card outside the polished area at about 20 to 30 feet, holding a 2 foot white board with black lines every 3/4 to 1 inch apart, in a criss cross pattern. The idea is, that the person looking at the board moves his head about to see if there is any movement in the parallelnes of the lines. If there is, he has to start again. With a large area to blend in the polishing, it is relatively easy. To do this with a pair of spectacles would take a lot of practice. My advice is go and buy a new pair, or if they are extremely fine marks, pay a visit to a local caravan emporium and ask for some perspex polish and try that. If you have no luck, you will have lost the cast of a bottle of polish.
In a few days, I hope to have a league table of polishes that are freely available from someone that is restoring very old pipes.
Dave
Brasso and/or T-cut work fine.
Thanks, yes I had this vague memory that metal polish was the thing to try. These aren't coated lenses, or at least if they were the coating has long gone. They're not photographic or high resolution lenses so incredible precision isn't an issue.
Many years ago I used Brasso wadding to lightly polish out a scratch in a perspex looking record deck cover. I can still remember the horror of watching the small scratch widen into a crack that propagated straight through the material. I assume the solvent in the wadding was to blame.
Jon McD
I was talking about the stuff that is liquid in a tin. (Never crossed my mind that there are two sorts of Brasso - which there are - and still less that someone would use it for this purpose.)
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