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Healamp Reflectors

Posted: 30 Sep 2010 10:05 am
by Hell Driver
I'm currently sorting through some of my spare parts, headlamps at the moment.

I have quite a few spare ones, most of which have very poor corroded/tarnished reflectors. I wondered if anyone knows of any sources of new reflectors. This is not urgent (for me anyway) as my cars have decent reflectors at the moment an I have one good set of spares.

Would it even be possible to get old ones re-silvered if we got enough together?

This is something which may be important in the next few years as it's a potential M.O.T. failure. I've noticed that even my 'always garaged' 1983 18,000 mile GLS reflectors are 'less shiny' than the spare set I recently got off a 89 G reg which had stood outside for a while. I've also noticed while dismantling the lights that much of the damage is caused by the central metal thing around the bulb, which corrodes and drops nasty white stuff on the reflector. I expect the heat and contaminants from the bulb with moisture does the rest of the damage.

I have a couple of sets of lights that I could make available for people if I could get the reflectors!

Re: Healamp Reflectors

Posted: 30 Sep 2010 01:55 pm
by Ride_on
You used to be able to buy reflectors from Volvo for the same price you could get the full unit (OE from ECP), £50. My lights have always been pretty rubbish compared with new, so I have wanted to do this one way or another.

Possibly a company like this might be able to do it but would probably need a group buy;
http://www.vmclimited.co.uk/metalising.php

I havn't looked at prices or anything other than a bit of web research.

A cheaper way if doing it is with aluminium tape, or metal polish if you are lucky to have a complete coating.

Re: Healamp Reflectors

Posted: 30 Sep 2010 06:48 pm
by Hell Driver
Thanks for that. Since my first post I contacted a couple of places and didn't get much luck. One place which does it could do them but it involved putting copper plating on then silver plating and was really expensive (£120+VAT per light!!) :shock: (this process is for much older cars really 20's 30's etc with copper/brass based reflectors) Ours are steel with aluminium as far as I know, so that place in your link is a better bet, electro plating with aluminium. I bet it's still not cheap though. I'll try the polish idea with some that are otherwise to far gone to use.

Re: Healamp Reflectors

Posted: 01 Oct 2010 06:14 pm
by Ride_on
Ours are plastic, with evaporated aluminium vacuum deposition, with a lacquer cover I assume. You cannot electroplate plastic.

Silver is over the top and not going to work in any case as it start with electroplated copper.