How to remove scratches from red dot?

[Hickok45]

I have a red dot that I believe is plastic, not glass. I've read a few ideas online for how to remove scratches from it but I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with it? I really don't want to make it worse.

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[Medic!]

Will polishing out the scratches remove the lens coating?

 

[bradsteen]

Use a lens cloth - the same type you use for cleaning eyeglasses.

 

[nammac]

There's actually watch crystal polishing kits available. If you believe your RD is plastics lenses, get the acrylic crystal polishing kit. There's several pastes of varying grittiness to work this scratches out. Having said that, the lens in the RD most likely has some sort of non-reflective coating, any polishing will compromise. Good luck.

 

[lucusloc]

I have a red dot that I believe is plastic, not glass. I've read a few ideas online for how to remove scratches from it but I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with it? I really don't want to make it worse.

Send it back to the manufacturer.

Basically all red dots, no matter how cheap, will have a lens coating to help with reflectivity and transmissivity of the correct wavelengths of light. Any attempt to polish it will destroy that coating and compromise the function of the lens. This is true even if the lens is just a flat protector and not the primary reflector. Any lens is, as we would say, "not user serviceable."

Will the lens work well enough even without that coating? Hard to say. Best case you probably degrade low-light or bright-light performance and the dot becomes difficult to see in those conditions. Worst case you destroy the reflectivity entirely and cannot see the dot at all. It is hard to say which one you will get without knowing the specs on the lens, and I doubt very much any manufacturer posts those specs anywhere. A lot of lens manufacturers treat those coatings as proprietary trade secrets.

If you just want to give it a try because it is a cheap RDS with zero manufacturer support you could get a plastic polishing kit online. Your best bet might be one of the polycarb polish kits that are common for automotive or aquarium use. You are going to want to figure out how to pull the lens out without destroying the sight, because if you try to polish it in the housing you will never get the edges done and will cause a ring-like haze where you cannot get the polish into the corners properly.

 

[JayDeep]

But a new one. Honestly, if it's bad enough you can't use it anymore, just replace it. If it isn't, then just ignore it. That's my best advice.