A4/S4 Headlight tinting experiments

My S4 headlight lenses could do with a bit of buffing as they’re looking little cloudy, but for the time being I thought I’d try tinting them as I had some stuff laying around.

So I had a can of spray tint, and some Flyeye vinyl tint film. Spray went first and was pretty simple to use, just a case of even, light coats until you’ve built up the level of tint you want. I put extra coats on at the top to create a slight gradient. Here’s how it looked…

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I wasn’t too impressed, I thought it was too grey and made the chrome parts inside look brown. So rather than just removing it straight away I wanted to see what it looked like with the Flyeye film over the top.

Standard vinyl application, complete pain in the ass; holding the heat gun in one hand, pulling the vinyl across with the other and stretching out creases with the other… Yep, you need three hands, or a willing helper. Anyway, here’s the result…

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Badass! Ridiculously black! However, this film like most vinyl films needs lots of repositioning to get it flat and when I lifted it off the lens it picked up the spray tint with it. This stopped the vinyl adhering to the lens properly and close up didn’t look very nice so I pulled off the film and cleaned off the spray tint with an alcohol cleaner.

Second try at Flyeye tint, no spray tint underneath…

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Still pretty dark, especially with the S4 charcoal plastics inside. I’ll be running these until I feel like a change and get the lenses professionally restored.

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// Matt

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