After many months of waiting and delays I finally had the time to install the new headlights lenses for my Cayman and I'm happy to report that the results are pretty good in my opinion.
Difficult to see in this picture but the headlight on the left is the original lens which is extremely pitted. Headlight on the right ( in first picture) is the finished light after disassembling, painting a couple of inner chromed rings with semi-gloss black paint to match the GTS and GT4 lights and re-assembling with the new lens. Photo on the right is the finished headlight installed on the car.
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Its probably difficult to appreciate in these pics but in person the light looks brand new. I doubt that these replacement lenses have any type of UV protection coating so now I'm going to look into getting them covered with Xpel or Suntek PPF to protect them from future road damage.
First step in this process was locating replacement lenses. The only place I found them back in March was a Chinese website "headlight-headlamp.com" although there seems to be a few other websites offering these lenses as mentioned in some of the posts above. I paid $380 via PayPal for both lenses including delivery. It took about 6 weeks for the day I ordered them to the day I received them at my home. The vendor supplied me with a tracking number 3 days after placing my order and then they apparently spent about 5 weeks in some type of customs warehouse in China awaiting approval to ship to U.S. Once they cleared the "Chinese customs black hole" I received them about 3 days later.
Work and other priorities kept me from tackling the project until this past weekend. I had read up and watched several youtube videos discussing how to replace headlight lenses stating that you had to heat the complete headlight in an oven at about 175 degrees etc, etc. My first step was going to be to completely remove the innards of the headlight but I soon realized that you can only remove all the inner components after removing the lens. Upon inspecting the lights in detail I realized that the lens was actually held in place by a continuos bead of RTV silicone.
Upon further investigation I found that RTV "begins" to soften at about 650 degrees F. so heating the headlight to that temperature was out of the question. I decided that I would cut and scrape out the silicone but to do that I would need to cut the outer ring of the existing headlight in order to get to the silicone so I cut the outer lip around the whole lens with my Dremel. Then I cut out as much silicone as I could with a utility knife and then dug out the remaining silicone using a screwdriver pick.
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I spent about 2 hours digging out pieces of silicone from all around the lens until it finally started to release. Once the lens came out I cleaned out and scraped as much of the remaining silicone from the lens groove and test fit the new lens to make sure it would seat properly. I then proceeded to removed the chrome rings from inside the lights (another 1 hour hassle), painted them and reinstalled them. I filled the lens groove with new RTV silicone and reset the new lens without much problem. It took me about 6 hours to do the first light and probably an additional 3-4 hours to do the second light but in the end I'm happy with the result and feel it was worth it.