Fitzter
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I love my Platinum, But It's just too much chrome, so I decided to do something totally different from de-chroming or blackout/color match it. Why not a bit of both. I painted cars for 30+ years, most of that time at a luxury car dealer. Mercedes-AMG were one of the first factory approved custom kits available at the time, and color matching the chrome and handles was all the rage.
Chrome doesn't like paint, so it takes careful prep and special products to do properly to keep it from peeling or chipping easily. If doing the entire piece, sanding can work, but still hard and time-consuming to do properly. I decide to leave a chrome outline on all the moldings and fill them with paint. To do this I cleaned and pre-masked the parts with vinyl fine line tape then media/sand blasted the chrome.
Next, the only primer to use is a 2K epoxy primer and just enough to cover at the manufacturer's minimum thickness, plastic parts should be scuffed with a medium scuff pad and pre-spayed with a good plastic adhesion promoter before priming.
Painting isn't the hard part, anyone with a little practice can do it. Matching paint is hard. Professionally, I had an entire rack of self stirring tinting/mixing toners I could alter colors with. Temperature, humidity, spray pressure, drying speed and paint transparency all effect the colors' outcome. The same can of paint used one day can look different if it's raining the next day, with everything else being equal. I've been retired for 12 years so all my painting connections are gone, so like all you other DIY guys I have to buy retail off the shelf mixes. Here's an example of the same paint with 3 under coat colors and the number of coats of paint starting with 1 to 5.
Ford D4 Lucid red is a tri-coat paint color originally called candy apple red for its metallic base coat with a red tinted clear mid-coat. What they sold me was not a true 3 stage formula but a hybrid more for repairing and blending into a tri-coat. True candy would be a silver, gold or now days a pinkish red Pearl with red tinted mid-coat. If you look at the middle card you'll see a faint line going across all the layers, that's the mid-coat, adding more darkens with every coat. The other cards had silver and gold metallic under coats and looked bad, but without the proper real paint it was all I could do to try to get a better match. In the end, I just put 5 coats of base and added mid-coat till it was as good as it could be. Bordering everything in chrome helps break up the color edge to edge match, but it still kills me I couldn't get it better.
Chrome doesn't like paint, so it takes careful prep and special products to do properly to keep it from peeling or chipping easily. If doing the entire piece, sanding can work, but still hard and time-consuming to do properly. I decide to leave a chrome outline on all the moldings and fill them with paint. To do this I cleaned and pre-masked the parts with vinyl fine line tape then media/sand blasted the chrome.
Next, the only primer to use is a 2K epoxy primer and just enough to cover at the manufacturer's minimum thickness, plastic parts should be scuffed with a medium scuff pad and pre-spayed with a good plastic adhesion promoter before priming.
Painting isn't the hard part, anyone with a little practice can do it. Matching paint is hard. Professionally, I had an entire rack of self stirring tinting/mixing toners I could alter colors with. Temperature, humidity, spray pressure, drying speed and paint transparency all effect the colors' outcome. The same can of paint used one day can look different if it's raining the next day, with everything else being equal. I've been retired for 12 years so all my painting connections are gone, so like all you other DIY guys I have to buy retail off the shelf mixes. Here's an example of the same paint with 3 under coat colors and the number of coats of paint starting with 1 to 5.
Ford D4 Lucid red is a tri-coat paint color originally called candy apple red for its metallic base coat with a red tinted clear mid-coat. What they sold me was not a true 3 stage formula but a hybrid more for repairing and blending into a tri-coat. True candy would be a silver, gold or now days a pinkish red Pearl with red tinted mid-coat. If you look at the middle card you'll see a faint line going across all the layers, that's the mid-coat, adding more darkens with every coat. The other cards had silver and gold metallic under coats and looked bad, but without the proper real paint it was all I could do to try to get a better match. In the end, I just put 5 coats of base and added mid-coat till it was as good as it could be. Bordering everything in chrome helps break up the color edge to edge match, but it still kills me I couldn't get it better.
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