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| 1991 VW Golf GTi Lookalike with Original Small Bumpers and Smoke Tinted Rear Lights. |
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Car: 1991 VW Golf Mk2
Colour: Marine Blue
If like us you hate orange lenses, then you either need to remove and replace them, or go for the cheaper option of making the best of what you've got! (In other words paint over them!)
Mk2 VW Golfs, have so many after-market lights available that if you wish to replace the original lights, then you are actually spoilt for choice. You can go for smoked, clear, red, green, or blue tinted light clusters. You can even get Lexus style lights and now LED light clusters. The choice is entirely yours.
We wanted the lights to look like GTi ones but without the costs. Smoked GTi lights do come up on ebay cheap enough from time to time, but if we were gonna wait, we still had to do something about getting rid of the orange effect on the original lights for the time being.
This was quite easily rectified using some Tail Light Tinting Spray. You should not use ordinary car aerosol spray paints, because these will block out too much light. Tail light tint spray is specially developed as a transparent paint, so that light still passes through after painting. Although obviously if you apply it too thickly then you will still be reducing the amount of light passing through.
The best way to apply it, is in several very thin coats, until the desired tint level is achieved.
With these lights we wanted to tint the orange section deeply, without tinting the red reflector too much, as the reflectors are a legal requirement, and we did not want to make them illegally dark. To avoid this we masked off the outside edge of the lights, then we masked off the bottom red section. This meant that after spraying the orange bit (indicator) and clear bit (reverse) we removed the mask off the red section and then sprayed all the lenses together. This gave us the desired effect we wanted, with the top section being tinted more than the bottom section, but with the outer edge remaining unpainted.
As you can see from the second photo above, the red rear reflectors still work!
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