Custom tail light experiment.

The other day, I got this wild hair to do something with my tail lights. I didn’t really want to use night shades, so I thought about what else I could do without buying a whole new pair of aftermarket ones. Then it hit me: why not paint designs on them? But I had it in my head that I could do it a certain way, so I decided to do an experiment to find out how it would look.

I went down to my job earlier and picked up these tail light lenses off of an old Pathfinder. I wanted a lens with the red, white and amber colors, and these were easy to remove. I was a little pressed for time, so I got these, some black spray paint, and some masking tape, and I headed back home.

The idea was to use the masking tape to put a design on the lens and paint it with an opaque paint, allowing light to only pass through the design I created. Rather than spray paint the outside of the lens, I decided to paint the inside. I had a theory that the black paint on the inside would cause the red lens to look like a darker red on the outside, giving it a “smoke” effect without the night shades.

I masked off parts of the inside, making little designs that would later be the only parts of the lens that the light would shine through, theoretically. I took them outside and got to painting.

I didn’t spend a lot of time painting the lenses; I just applied a few layers to get them painted enough to be opaque. While waiting on the paint to dry, I decided to clean out the mounds of trash that were in my car. Once I was done with that, I brought the lenses back inside and unmasked them. Here was the results:

So two things: one, my masking skills are undoubtedly atrocious, and two, my theory was completely wrong. Rather than darkening the painted portion of the lens from the outside, it was just black. But I wasn’t disappointed with the results, because it still looked pretty good.

My conclusion is that this idea does have the potential to work. Maybe using a dark red instead of black could give it the smoked look that I want. With a little more time and effort, this could look really good on the Camry, or any car for that matter. Hell, it could be the newest car trend of 2017 (dream big, chaps, dream big…).

If anyone decides to give this a try, please share it and tag me. I would love to see what you creative geniuses can do with this idea!

Disclaimer: doing this may be illegal in your area, so be sure to find out the laws about how much of your taillight you can block out before doing this.