i think on your blazer because its a sporty looking blazer i would go with the body color match trim, on my truck i would do black cause mines more offroad and i have a black and tan look going, but post pictures cause i wanted to do it and i wanna see how it looks in our color

 

Alright, I think it's going to be Saturday until I can get to it, but I'll post some up once it's done.

 

mines already the same color xD

 

Well, I finally got out and repainted the trim. Also decided to see how the grill would look black.. I am not happy with the trim results at all. Wetsanding was an epic fail.


I started out sanding each side for a good 45mins with 600 grade paper, it felt smooth but but I would later discover it wasn't. Then I primed and it looked awful so I sanded again with 600 for a good hour each side. Still couldn't get the roughness to go away. Primed again and re-sanded with 400 followed by 600, still not happy. I recommend using a power sander for at least the initial sanding. Overall it does look better than it did, but no where near what it should for spending 8 hours on it. Initially I did the whole sanding/prepping/painting process with pewter paint. It matched almost perfectly but the roughness of the plastic made it look like complete trash. So i re-did everything and went with black. Overall..talk about a PITA for some not so nice results. Very disappointed,

I need to get a power sander and re-due them but I don't fell like messing with it anymore.

Before:




Sanding:



Priming:




Painting:


Final Product:



Grille Before:

After:

 

That sucks man...I'm kinda afraid to even attempt mine lol. Did you not even bother trying with a more aggressive same paper first? And how many coats of primer did you use? Generally primer will fill in all the minor imperfections and roughness. Either way the black looks way better then the faded and pitting plastic did. How come no pics of when it was pewter? was it THAT bad? lol.
Oh, and kudos on the the black grille. It looks much better then the pewter IMO.

I just noticed...wtf happened to your tow hooks?

 

I tried both 400 and 600, had some 200 layin around but I was ready to be done with it so I didnt bother. The 3rd pic under "sanding" is pewter.. and yes it was THAT bad.

Used 4 coats (2 full bottles) of primer to no avail. I do think it's an improvement from what it was before, but still not what I had hoped it would have been. Honestly if I had known it was going to take 8 hours to get these results, I wouldnt have messed with it.

Tow hooks? What tow hooks? Thanks for the kudos on the grille, I like it too.

 

Welcome to the world of custom painting, and the insane amount of labor involved

Kind of hard to tell exactly what's going on from the pictures, was it general roughness like pitting, or just scratches from the sand paper? If sandpaper scratches, going to numberically lower grit will only make it worse.

Either way, use a high fill primer...you can get stuff that will fill in 80 grit paper scratches, some even going as far as 36 grit scratches (although there's really no good reason to try and prime a surface that rough, lol). You'll also want to lay down several layers of primer, with sanding in between.

 

I did lay down primer and I am aware that a lower grit sand paper will make it rougher. The roughness you see on the finished product is the pitting of the plastic. I think the problem was I did not use a rough enough sandpaper to get rid of the pitting to begin with. I put on 4 layers of primer between the sanding. Basically after all the work all I did was put a layer of paint over the trim to make it appear less damaged.

 

That's insane that it took that much work just to get it looking a little better... what would you have to fill the pits with? Bondo?

If only someone made something like a "vent shade" that would could put over them to mask the ugliness.

 

Yeah I think at some point I'm going to re-do them using bondo to fill in the pits.