I'm thinking of attempting to paint my headlight and taillight housings black on my black evo VIII, im just kinda wary on doing it myself I just wanted to ask some of the more experienced evo owners on what they thought about it, is it pretty easy to do? I just needed help on a few things before i tried it

1. So i just use a hot air gun (hair dryer?) to peel apart the housings and lens (pry open with knife or something or will heat gun seperate the lenses by itself?)

2. What kind of paint would you guys recommend?

3. Can I just pull the amber reflectors out to get the "clear" look?

4. What do I use to reseal the lights and where can i find it?

If anyone can give my ANY input or instruction it would really be appreciated

 

I don't know if this will help as I have only done this on a Subaru 2.5 rs (I plan on diong it with my Tarmac 8 as well).

1) A hair dryer
2) a SMALL flathead screwdriver
3) imense patience and self control

heat up the goo (adhesive) around the light housing until it is virtually too hot to touch. SLOWLY,CAREFULLY pull/pry the two housing pieces apart (this is where the SMALL screwdriver comes in). If you fell any heavy resistance, heat up the goo with the blow dryer some more. Continue the pry job until the two parts are separated.
I don't know about painting, but I would ASSUME that a nice high quality spray paint would work fine. Flat or gloss. Be sure to tape everything off that you don't want painted.
When you are ready to reconnect the housing, reheat BOTH pieces along the goo line. Get them nice and hot and GENTLY, CAREFULLY press them back together. The goo will reapply itself as long as it is nice and hot.

NOTE: this is from a 2.5 rs, NOT an EVO (yet), but the same rules should apply.

BE CAREFUL.

 

I know on my rsx we found the best way was to put them in the oven and then take them out and u just have to rip them apart, also if they are the same as mine then you should get some silicon to put around them when u reseal to make sure you get a fog free seal, if you really want i can look up exactly how i did it to my rsx

 

There is a thread on www.dcevoclub.com that has some very good instructions on doing this.

 

The tail light mod is a HUGE pain in the ***! Mitsu didn't use silicon to seal them, which would have made everything a hell of a lot easier. The adhesive is in a very thin layer and requires a lot of concentrated heat to melt. I used the tips on this site to do it. 250 degrees in the oven for 15 minutes gets the tails to as hot as they can get without melting. After that, you need to heat a blade and slowly try to melt the adhesive. And that's just to open them up. If I had to do it all over again, I'd just use a heat gun.