Lower Exterior Trim Plastics

Hello,

Does anyone have any experience of repairing the lower exterior trim plastics? I am referring to the satin black textured parts at the bottoms of the bumpers and sides.

I ask because on my left rear wheel arch, there is a scuff to the lower plastic area. The plastic is not cracked at all, merely scuffed. I'm fairly confident of getting the area flat again with various grades of sandpaper, but am struggling to work out how best it should be painted. Is there a specific paint for these areas?

I have seen Toms (Timmus) thread a few years ago about this subject, although no fix that had been tried was posted. I'd certainly be interested to find out how others have rectified such a problem; apart from replacing the damaged items. Toms thread can be seen here. http://www.a2oc.net/forum/showthread.php?20711-Bumper-Repair

I have attached a picture below of the scuff to my wheel arch.

Kind regards,

Matt.

Your best option is to find a rear arch of the same colour that is not scuffed on the plastic.

Or have a good arch resprayed.

YorkshireHills car has a perfect one of these (see her breaking thread). I am sure for small price plus postage you can have a shiny new one.

You can see the part in this image I think:

I have a similar graze on my front arch low down. I have already changed the door mirror casing and door strip that was damaged by anonymous. I wondered if wrapping was the answer but these areas are soft and wrapping involves heating. I expect the whole lower section around the car would need the same attention too.

Thank you for your responses.

As you say, I'll have to keep an eye out on eBay for a brilliant black wheel arch. This seems to be the most 'guaranteed option'.
I may experiment with 'Plasti-Kote' in the next few days, not on the car, of course. If this is a good match, I'll spray the area with the damage, take some photographs and report back.

Thanks for the help.

Regards,

Matt.

An update to this.

I ended up using 'Plasti-Kote' to spray the lower arch black piece. It turned out much better than I expected, the colour match is very very close. The finish isn't perfect due to the fact I didn't want to remove too much material from the plastic, there are some indentations left, but you have to look hard to spot them. From a normal distance of a metre or so away, you cannot tell the difference. I'm pretty happy with the result.

The Plasti-Kote spray I used was satin black multi surface spray paint, as pictured below.

Anyway, the following pictures show parts of the process.

Before:


Masked, pre sanding:


Immediately after first spray, post sanding:


Around 1 hour after after the top coat, I expect it to get slightly more 'matte' as the full drying time was much longer. A close match though. Note the marks left from the deep scuffs:


The spray paint used:


I feel like the 1 hour dry final photo doesn't do the work much justice. Sure, you can see the indentations left, but in real life, they're far less noticeable. Unless you looked, you wouldn't spot them.

I'm happy!

Regards,

Matt.

Nice work matt. Well done.

Tho I think with that plastikote stuff you do not have to rub the surface down? So pretty easy to use, but for near perfect results you can buy that plastic coulered paint and rub the scuffs out and prep the area properly and it would look as good as new.

Hi Scott,

Yes, I think you're correct. I only rubbed down the surface because the scuff had caused some of plastic to be higher than the rest of the trim. Sanding removed these high spots and also removed most of the lighter scuff. Only the deeper parts of the scuff remains, which I didn't want to remove because I could have lost the shape of the trim due to removing so much material, although I'm sure you could use filler to rectify this.

I used the Plasti-Kote over the plastic coloured paint because of some reviews I had read over at the T4 forum, with the black bumper paint coming off over time in flakes; not something that was reported with Plasti-Kote.

I'll try and get a better picture of the colour match when I can.

Regards,

Matt.

Good work

Great job. Good technique for a minor scrape