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From my trip to Montana.

And a bonus. Not that impressive... till you consider that it's from a smartphone, handheld.

Pretty amazing shots -- especially for a camera phone.  

Just sanded / sprayed my headlights

Still need to cut and polish tommorow but looking really good. Used a 2K urethane clear this time, so should hold up for a while. Going to put a uv resistant clear bra over the lights as well, after they have a few days to finish hardening up

that came out beautifully!  Nice work! 

Would you mind sharing a little more about the 2K urethane clear that you applied.  I am fortunate in the my Spyder's headlights continue to look pretty good since my car is now a garage queen.  I am having issues with my 2012 Prius V headlights.  I can buff them out to look pretty good, but the surface hazes-over fairly quickly in our Central California sun.  I have concerns about clear-coating them once I buff them out, in that, I really don't want to have to sand them down to the original plastic once they haze-over again.  Old and lazy?  Yes. 🙂 

I invite/request yours and other community members experiences around this.  Thank you, y'all, in advance for your wisdom, hope and experience. 

Just make sure to use a very good respirator. That stuff will ruin your lungs. 

@uncle-mush @dev

You hit it right in the head dev. 2K paints are verrrrrry bad to inhale. I wore a 3m half face respirator with the organic vapour cartridges and p100 filters. I always wear that when spray painting but def good to emphasize in this case.

Uncle Mush, so 2K urethane paints have an activator and the main paint body. The activator works as a hardener for the paint, delivering much better hardness and chemical resistance compared to normal spray paints. Normally you can only shoot these with a paint gun but a couple companies make them im a can. Once you activate the can you have a certain amount of time to shoot it before it hardens up. 

Specifically, I used spraymax 2K clear, for headlights. It supposedly has very good uv resistance. I follwed the technical sheet from spray max regarding final sanding grit and flash times. The final grit was p2000, wet. I did all sanding by hand but if you have an electric sander it would be much quicker.

Its important to coat headlighta with something uv resistant after a resto, because the reason they turned yellow was due to the uv inhibitors in the plastic being used up.

Im gonna clear bra the lighta with a uv resistant clear bra for extra protection

so hopefully i will never have to do this again lol.

Adding to this, exposure to 2 pack paints are the majority cause of occupational asthma in the uk. They are the gold standard in paint work but wear a mask.

@ria What vendor are you getting the clear bra from? I have done this before with other headlights, but when I tried with the Spyder I had major issues with fitment. Product was 3M but I don't remember which... XPEL maybe? Vendor said I didn't stretch it enough... I still don't know if the problem was me or the cut. 

I have a brand new set of headlights in the garage, would like to get some protection on them before letting them out in the wild.

@marsrock7 

Im looking at suntek and xpel right now. My main concern was uv protection, service life, and safe removal when the time comes.

Tbh, I might get a shop to apply it because our lights seem kind of unruly to do and I've never done this before. Ive heard of some people cutting the ppf into two sections, one for the side of the light, and one for the rest of it.

I figure the cost of my buying enough suntek or xpel to practice and do it with, im not saving much by doing it myself. Would be a different story if I had experience with it though.

Also, xpel reccomends using a steamer to assist with the stretching, and i think it is heat activated so you have to run over it with a heatgun at the end? Oh yeah and Ive heard that standard headlight kits for this are too small for the mr2 since our lights are so tall

@ria I had thought XPEL was a 3M product before... Now seeing it is not. Maybe I just remember the name but it is not what I bought. Nonetheless, I have done this with a couple of other cars with no issue but failed (twice!) When trying to apply to MR2 lights. Being reminded of this now, I may opt to let a pro do it for me too 😛

Just put new headlight assemblies on my Outback too, maybe I'll try my luck with applying film to those first.

Looking at the XPEL site... They don't even offer a precut kit for our headlights:

https://www.xpel.com/headlight-protection-kits/US--AND--Canada/Passenger-Cars--AND--Light-Trucks/2001/Toyota/MR2-Spyder/None

I sold this today and made some money on it. prices for camera gear has gone up. This is probably the best looking camera I have owned. I never cared about how a camera looked but this one reminded me of an old Minolta SRT-101 that was my fathers. 

It takes very nice pictures but It takes a back seat to my other cameras and will just gather dust. The adapted lenses I have for it are much larger than this little camera so its pointless if my goal was to use it for travel as I am griping a fat lens to my eye which is kind of comical. 

I went to another car show on Sunday at a heritage farm museum. The people there were very nice with a great selection of cars. As usual they asked me what news paper I was with. With this old camera I am impressed with how analog the images come out. Next month I plan to shoot a roll of film which should be interesting because I believe film is still better.  

This is a set of three from the same car. These old cars have so much character you don't see anymore. Simply stunning. What ruined my picture taking is when its next to a modern car. 

Posted by: @dev

This is a set of three from the same car. These old cars have so much character you don't see anymore. Simply stunning. What ruined my picture taking is when its next to a modern car. 

Interesting color and finish.