Polishing out score marks in acrylic hatch cover

A quick trip down to your local Halfords will get you a Meguiers Headlight Restorer kit. It comes complete with the compound, appropriate grades of wet and dry paper and a buffing wheel for your drill. Works brilliantly on acrylic and polycarbonates, and I used this recently for a hatch cover (as well as my headlights).
 
Basically you grind out the scratch with course wet and dry sand paper. This in itself will scratch the surrounding area. This is then ground smooth with finer W&D and so on until a fine grouinding type polish is used to hopefully leave the acrylic/perspex clear. However if the scratch is deep you will find some optical distortion in the variation in depth of the acrylic/perspex. All takes a bit of work. good luck olewill
 
The windows-thick clear perspex when new-on the boat we purchased in NZ recently were so scratched, painted over and faded that inside was perpetual gloom.

I remembered the way we sorted the perspex bubble screens on the race bikes. As suggested by others, wet and dry, used VERY wet, starting with 400 and going through down to 1600.

When this was complete, I hand polished with Brasso, using micro-fibre cloths.

They are not perfect-and short of being replaced never will be-but now they let in light and can be seen through.

An immense improvement for little cost, but my wrists knew all about it!

Good Luck.
 
One of my hatches was very badly scuffed over perhaps 25% of its surface.

Just as an experiment I tried rubbing it with Peek metal polish which I had bought on Amazon for the metalwork on the boat but noticed that it said "plastics" as well on the tin.

It was excellent and, after an hours rubbing, the hatch is virtually perfect. After that I tried the Peek on some stains on the GRP hull and it was excellent once again!

If Peek works so well, perhaps any metal polish is worth a try?

Richard
 
I'm going to do my hatches and skylights this season. Once done I'm going to apply a covering of exterior grade uv/bomb protection window film. I'm working on the basis that it's relatively cheap and can be replaced every few seasons acting as a sacrificial sorface.
 
Thanks guys. Some helpful replies. Looks like a bit of manual labour is going to be necessary.

Maybe I should have persevered with the glue solvents rather than taken the quick solution with the Skarsten scraper!
 
"Polishing out score marks in acrylic hatch cover"

Grind out the scratch as normal, but when polishing, I find it pays to break a few rules. You are left with series of tiny mountains and valleys. If you polish with the wheel in line with these, you will be polishing the valleys as well as the mountain tops. As a result it is easy to end up with a slightly distorted finish. If you polish across, only the mountains will be polished away and you will get a more glass like finish.
 
Scratches now removed. I used an orbital sander with 320 (very) wet & dry over the scratched area only followed by Farecla G4 rubbing compound on electric polisher, 3M machine glaze and then finished with metal polish by hand.

Choice of materials was what I had in the garage. I guess it's not critical.
 
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