Separating Lens from Headlight or Fog Light Assembly

One of the most common tasks that can be accomplished when working with headlights and fog lights is to separate the lens from the assembly. This process can be quite challenging, especially if you're not familiar with how these components are designed to work together. The good news is that with a few simple tools and some patience, it's possible to successfully remove the lens and reassemble everything back to its original state.

To begin, you'll need to acquire a heat gun or use a box to heat up the assembly. This will help loosen up the adhesive that holds the lens in place, making it easier to separate from the rest of the components. It's also worth noting that some headlight and fog light assemblies are more difficult to work with than others, depending on their design and the type of adhesive used.

For example, I once attempted to use a heat gun directly onto the headlight lens, which resulted in a bubbled-up finish. This was a costly mistake, but one that I've learned from and will avoid in the future. Instead, it's recommended to use the heat gun or box method without direct heat on the lens, as this can cause damage and affect the final result.

To separate the lens from the assembly, you'll need to get your hands under there and pry it gently. The key is to be patient and not apply too much pressure, as you don't want to crack or break the lens in the process. It's also a good idea to use some lubricant, such as silicone spray, to help loosen up the adhesive and make it easier to work with.

Another tip for separating lenses from headlight or fog light assemblies is to inspect the adhesive used before attempting to remove the lens. In my case, I found that the adhesive was quite different between the two components, which made a big difference in terms of ease of removal. The tacky glue on one component was much easier to work with than the harder, more rigid glue on the other.

Once you've successfully separated the lens from the assembly, it's time to clean everything up and get ready for reassembly. This is where the glass cleaner comes in handy, as it can help remove any dirt or debris that may have accumulated inside the headlight or fog light over time.

One of the most significant benefits of being able to separate lenses from headlight or fog light assemblies is the ability to clean them thoroughly without damaging the components. As you'll see later on in this article, I was able to use a combination of glass cleaner and elbow grease to get my headlights looking like new again.

Reassembling the Lens

Now that we've cleaned everything up, it's time to reassemble the lens. The process is relatively straightforward, but it does require some patience and attention to detail. To start, you'll need to apply a small amount of adhesive to the edge of the lens where it meets the assembly.

As I demonstrated in my previous tutorial on how to fix a headlight, using a heat gun or box method can be an effective way to reassemble lenses from headlight or fog light assemblies. The key is to make sure that the lens is compressed tightly against the housing, which will help prevent any moisture issues down the line.

To ensure a good seal, I like to use clamps to hold everything in place while it cools and sets. This can be a bit tricky, especially if you're working with delicate components, so be careful not to apply too much pressure or squeeze the lens too tightly.

One final tip for reassembling lenses from headlight or fog light assemblies is to make sure that all of the gaps are sealed properly. In my case, I was able to use a combination of glass cleaner and elbow grease to get my headlights looking like new again. By paying close attention to every detail and using the right tools for the job, you can achieve professional-looking results that will last for years to come.

How-to Video

If you're interested in learning more about how to separate lenses from headlight or fog light assemblies, I recommend checking out my video tutorial on the topic. In this video, we'll take a closer look at the process and provide step-by-step instructions on how to do it safely and effectively.

As with any DIY project, there are a few things you should keep in mind before attempting to separate lenses from headlight or fog light assemblies. These include making sure that you have the right tools for the job, being patient and gentle when working with delicate components, and taking the time to clean everything thoroughly before reassembling.

By following these tips and using a combination of common sense and elbow grease, you can achieve professional-looking results that will last for years to come. Whether you're a seasoned DIY enthusiast or just starting out on your automotive journey, separating lenses from headlight or fog light assemblies is a skill worth learning.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys Chris fix here today I'm going to show you how to take apart a headlight lens without using your home oven I'm not allowed to use the oven for anything except food so instead what I'm going to use is a homemade I guess you could call it oven it's just a cardboard box with a heat gun in it I'll get more into how I set this up but just give you an idea here's everything you're going to need got some gloves for when the lenses are hot Flathead screwdrivers for prying the lenses open pliers and some of these plastic clamps for clamping down the headlight lens to reglue it so some reasons you might consider removing your headlight lens from your headlight is because you want to clean the inside I made a bunch of videos on cleaning the outside just apply that to cleaning the inside I've had a lot of questions of how to clean the inside so here you go just got to separate them and clean them and then put them back together another reason you might be doing a retrofit for a projector lens so you need to get inside here you might want to spray paint these or something might want to put some LEDs on the inside for running lights there's a bunch of reasons and one of the reasons I'm separating my fog light lenses for my truck I have mud all inside my fog light lenses so I'm going to show you how to separate them so that you can clean them out if you want I've seen some people just use a heat gun and they just go along the edges like this and they heat up an edge and then pry that apart and heat up another Edge and pry that apart but I don't really recommend this method I really find that using a box is a lot more consistent you consistently heat up the headlight you're not putting direct heat onto the a lens which could damage the plastic the best method that you could use to separate headlight or fog light lens is the home oven you know you set the timer you set the temperature everything's perfect for this if you're going to use a home oven make sure you put tin foil or something underneath so that if it does leak glue it doesn't leak it into your oven since I'm not allowed to use the oven for anything except food sometimes you need to get creative and that's why I created my box oven before I get into how I made my box oven I have a list of car makes and models in the description with the temperature at which people have successfully removed the headlight lenses this isn't a complete list so if you have a maker model or a temperature to add comment below and I'll add it to the list now for my box oven you could see the heat gun goes in right there this is where the headlight sits it sits facing up nothing's touching the lens right here there's a baffle so the heat hits the baffle and comes up and over so there's no direct Heat against the lens if you have any direct heat on the lens the lens will will melt and on the back here you could see I have an instant read thermometer you can just turn it on by pressing that and what it does is it reads the temperature of the air right next to the headlight you should also have a fire extinguisher as a safety precaution I never had any problems but it's better to be safe than sorry with the sealed beam headlight in place we'll close everything and we'll start up our heat gun the headlight in here is a seal beam headlight and I'm going to heat the Box up to 250° and hold that temperature for 10 minutes as this temperature is rising I just want to explain something real quick if your car isn't on the list in the description and you don't know what temperature to soften the glue at start at 250° f for 8 minutes and see if it works if not increase the soak time first before you try increasing the temperature i' would go 250 for 15 minutes and if that doesn't work try 270 for 10 okay so once the temperature is around 250° F I'll put the heat gun on low and that'll maintain that 250 50° we want to stay within 10° of the 250° Mark for 10 minutes so as we near the 250 Mark we want to get your glove and your two screwdrivers ready they're flatheads one's a skinny one and one's a thick one 10 minutes has been elapsed let's shut that off and we want to move quickly when we do this undo your top here I'm wearing one glove to handle the headlight and you're just going to slip your screwdriver in here and then turn it you want to be careful not to damage the headlight housing but just work your way around once you get a big enough opening you could fit the screwdriver in like that and then just run the screwdriver along make sure you're not damaging your plastic see that's popping open these headlights are actually pretty difficult it'll probably be easier for your headlights hopefully okay and then once you got enough of it open you could just take this and pry it just like that be careful cuz these headlights are still very hot there you go you might need new glue in this case I don't think this glue is reusable this is kind of like that permanent glue so you're going to have to either use that be rubber glue or use some type of SE when you're putting these back together I'll show you that on the fog light but that's how you easily separate them now I'm going to take one of my fog lights here I want to clean out the inside and I'm going to show you how to separate a fog light lens same deal as before get your fog light lens lens up close up your box and we're going to just turn on the heat gun we'll get that temperature up to 250 one more time and then we'll let that sit for 8 to 10 minutes and I'll show you this method works on fog light lenses as well also this fog light lens uses a different type of glue so you'll be able to see the difference between the two glues so it's been about 10 minutes and we're at 257 close enough to 250 so now we're going to go take out these fog light lenses and pry them apart get our fog light out and then you'll see how how much easier this fog light is just get that in there turn it and look at that this glue is complet completely different it's a lot easier and you don't have to use a lot of prying force or anything it just pryes right open you can see the glue here is kind of a tacky glue compared to the headlight which was more of a hard glue so now just separate this it's easier to work without gloves and when it's cool enough you could definitely do that now you don't want to clean this glue off cuz you're going to reuse this glue those look really clean on the inside there which is good but on the inside here this is all dirt before I start cleaning anything what you want to do is you want to make sure the glue isn't hot cuz you don't want to have sticky glue on your fingers and burning you but just move that glue back onto the edge here cuz we're going to be reusing this glue and there's plenty of glue here to be reused okay now I'm just going to get some glass cleaner clean the insides here and that looks a lot better good outside is a little dirty but we don't have to worry about that right now now what we're going to do is we're going to take our lens here and we're going to just put it on top of the assembly the glue is still a little warm but it's not warm enough but I'm going to just kind of push this in right now open up our box put the fog light in close up the box and we're just going to heat this up for 5 minutes to 10 minutes I think it's only going to take 5 minutes because that fog light was still pretty warm and then we're going to clamp it together to make sure that there's a solid seal okay this is only 5 minutes later you might need 10 minutes it really depends on how much you let your headlights cool and what you're going to do is grab the lens and also the outside the assembly and squeeze it together and you want to just do this the whole way around just want the whole lens squeezed completely tight I'm actually not even going to use the paper towel what I was going to do is I was going to put the paper towel over it like that and then just squeeze but want to know what the pliers fits on here nicely and I'm not causing damage to the lens or to the plastic you want to make sure that you seal this completely you press it all the way in you don't want any gaps in there if you want you could use new be rubber glue but I had enough here to reuse and on most headlights and most fog lights you have enough when you take it off you put it back on and you could reuse it so as you let your fog lights or your headlights cool you want to make sure that the headlight lens or the fog light lens is compressed against the housing so to do that you just get these clamps and you could add more right now I have two I'll add a couple more around the edge I mean you can see how close that is there there's almost no Gap and that's awesome these things will cool and you won't have any moisture issues so there you go with a heat gun a box a few simple tools you could separate the lens for the fog light or the headlight you can do whatever you want with them you could clean them you could paint them you could retrofit them whatever and then you can put them right back together and seal them up good as new hopefully this video is helpful if it was remember to give it a thumbs up also if you're not a subscriber consider subscribing up on the screen you're going to be a bunch of how-to videos to get to them you can click on the screen or you can find the links to those videos in description below along with the links to the chrisfix Facebook and Twitter pages check it out and for the top tip for this video you could see my headlight right here is all bubbled up and the reason why that happened is because I used Too Much direct heat onto the headlight lens what happened was I was trying to use the heat gun method to try to loosen up the edges here and when I was using the heat gun method you could see that little bump right there not a big deal so I stopped using the heat gun method so then what happened was I made the box I put the heat gun in I figured the box was big enough I turned the heat gun on and I guess the heat gun even though it was almost a foot away it was blasting right up onto this and this bubbled up so top tip if you're going to use a heat gun or even use the box method do not allow direct heat onto the headlight trust me I learned from experience don't let it happen to youhey guys Chris fix here today I'm going to show you how to take apart a headlight lens without using your home oven I'm not allowed to use the oven for anything except food so instead what I'm going to use is a homemade I guess you could call it oven it's just a cardboard box with a heat gun in it I'll get more into how I set this up but just give you an idea here's everything you're going to need got some gloves for when the lenses are hot Flathead screwdrivers for prying the lenses open pliers and some of these plastic clamps for clamping down the headlight lens to reglue it so some reasons you might consider removing your headlight lens from your headlight is because you want to clean the inside I made a bunch of videos on cleaning the outside just apply that to cleaning the inside I've had a lot of questions of how to clean the inside so here you go just got to separate them and clean them and then put them back together another reason you might be doing a retrofit for a projector lens so you need to get inside here you might want to spray paint these or something might want to put some LEDs on the inside for running lights there's a bunch of reasons and one of the reasons I'm separating my fog light lenses for my truck I have mud all inside my fog light lenses so I'm going to show you how to separate them so that you can clean them out if you want I've seen some people just use a heat gun and they just go along the edges like this and they heat up an edge and then pry that apart and heat up another Edge and pry that apart but I don't really recommend this method I really find that using a box is a lot more consistent you consistently heat up the headlight you're not putting direct heat onto the a lens which could damage the plastic the best method that you could use to separate headlight or fog light lens is the home oven you know you set the timer you set the temperature everything's perfect for this if you're going to use a home oven make sure you put tin foil or something underneath so that if it does leak glue it doesn't leak it into your oven since I'm not allowed to use the oven for anything except food sometimes you need to get creative and that's why I created my box oven before I get into how I made my box oven I have a list of car makes and models in the description with the temperature at which people have successfully removed the headlight lenses this isn't a complete list so if you have a maker model or a temperature to add comment below and I'll add it to the list now for my box oven you could see the heat gun goes in right there this is where the headlight sits it sits facing up nothing's touching the lens right here there's a baffle so the heat hits the baffle and comes up and over so there's no direct Heat against the lens if you have any direct heat on the lens the lens will will melt and on the back here you could see I have an instant read thermometer you can just turn it on by pressing that and what it does is it reads the temperature of the air right next to the headlight you should also have a fire extinguisher as a safety precaution I never had any problems but it's better to be safe than sorry with the sealed beam headlight in place we'll close everything and we'll start up our heat gun the headlight in here is a seal beam headlight and I'm going to heat the Box up to 250° and hold that temperature for 10 minutes as this temperature is rising I just want to explain something real quick if your car isn't on the list in the description and you don't know what temperature to soften the glue at start at 250° f for 8 minutes and see if it works if not increase the soak time first before you try increasing the temperature i' would go 250 for 15 minutes and if that doesn't work try 270 for 10 okay so once the temperature is around 250° F I'll put the heat gun on low and that'll maintain that 250 50° we want to stay within 10° of the 250° Mark for 10 minutes so as we near the 250 Mark we want to get your glove and your two screwdrivers ready they're flatheads one's a skinny one and one's a thick one 10 minutes has been elapsed let's shut that off and we want to move quickly when we do this undo your top here I'm wearing one glove to handle the headlight and you're just going to slip your screwdriver in here and then turn it you want to be careful not to damage the headlight housing but just work your way around once you get a big enough opening you could fit the screwdriver in like that and then just run the screwdriver along make sure you're not damaging your plastic see that's popping open these headlights are actually pretty difficult it'll probably be easier for your headlights hopefully okay and then once you got enough of it open you could just take this and pry it just like that be careful cuz these headlights are still very hot there you go you might need new glue in this case I don't think this glue is reusable this is kind of like that permanent glue so you're going to have to either use that be rubber glue or use some type of SE when you're putting these back together I'll show you that on the fog light but that's how you easily separate them now I'm going to take one of my fog lights here I want to clean out the inside and I'm going to show you how to separate a fog light lens same deal as before get your fog light lens lens up close up your box and we're going to just turn on the heat gun we'll get that temperature up to 250 one more time and then we'll let that sit for 8 to 10 minutes and I'll show you this method works on fog light lenses as well also this fog light lens uses a different type of glue so you'll be able to see the difference between the two glues so it's been about 10 minutes and we're at 257 close enough to 250 so now we're going to go take out these fog light lenses and pry them apart get our fog light out and then you'll see how how much easier this fog light is just get that in there turn it and look at that this glue is complet completely different it's a lot easier and you don't have to use a lot of prying force or anything it just pryes right open you can see the glue here is kind of a tacky glue compared to the headlight which was more of a hard glue so now just separate this it's easier to work without gloves and when it's cool enough you could definitely do that now you don't want to clean this glue off cuz you're going to reuse this glue those look really clean on the inside there which is good but on the inside here this is all dirt before I start cleaning anything what you want to do is you want to make sure the glue isn't hot cuz you don't want to have sticky glue on your fingers and burning you but just move that glue back onto the edge here cuz we're going to be reusing this glue and there's plenty of glue here to be reused okay now I'm just going to get some glass cleaner clean the insides here and that looks a lot better good outside is a little dirty but we don't have to worry about that right now now what we're going to do is we're going to take our lens here and we're going to just put it on top of the assembly the glue is still a little warm but it's not warm enough but I'm going to just kind of push this in right now open up our box put the fog light in close up the box and we're just going to heat this up for 5 minutes to 10 minutes I think it's only going to take 5 minutes because that fog light was still pretty warm and then we're going to clamp it together to make sure that there's a solid seal okay this is only 5 minutes later you might need 10 minutes it really depends on how much you let your headlights cool and what you're going to do is grab the lens and also the outside the assembly and squeeze it together and you want to just do this the whole way around just want the whole lens squeezed completely tight I'm actually not even going to use the paper towel what I was going to do is I was going to put the paper towel over it like that and then just squeeze but want to know what the pliers fits on here nicely and I'm not causing damage to the lens or to the plastic you want to make sure that you seal this completely you press it all the way in you don't want any gaps in there if you want you could use new be rubber glue but I had enough here to reuse and on most headlights and most fog lights you have enough when you take it off you put it back on and you could reuse it so as you let your fog lights or your headlights cool you want to make sure that the headlight lens or the fog light lens is compressed against the housing so to do that you just get these clamps and you could add more right now I have two I'll add a couple more around the edge I mean you can see how close that is there there's almost no Gap and that's awesome these things will cool and you won't have any moisture issues so there you go with a heat gun a box a few simple tools you could separate the lens for the fog light or the headlight you can do whatever you want with them you could clean them you could paint them you could retrofit them whatever and then you can put them right back together and seal them up good as new hopefully this video is helpful if it was remember to give it a thumbs up also if you're not a subscriber consider subscribing up on the screen you're going to be a bunch of how-to videos to get to them you can click on the screen or you can find the links to those videos in description below along with the links to the chrisfix Facebook and Twitter pages check it out and for the top tip for this video you could see my headlight right here is all bubbled up and the reason why that happened is because I used Too Much direct heat onto the headlight lens what happened was I was trying to use the heat gun method to try to loosen up the edges here and when I was using the heat gun method you could see that little bump right there not a big deal so I stopped using the heat gun method so then what happened was I made the box I put the heat gun in I figured the box was big enough I turned the heat gun on and I guess the heat gun even though it was almost a foot away it was blasting right up onto this and this bubbled up so top tip if you're going to use a heat gun or even use the box method do not allow direct heat onto the headlight trust me I learned from experience don't let it happen to you\n"