Painting the Chrome

[Bliky]

So, coming the 26th I'm going to be doing an exhaust and coilovers on my 2012 Ti and I wanted to do a few other visual things to it while it's in the garage and we're working on it. Basically, I wanted to black out my tail lights using the Nite Shade stuff that was talked about in a recent topic but that seems relatively straight forward.

I also wanted to get rid of basically all the chrome on the car. I wanted to black out the chrome on the fog light bezels, the front whiskers, the badges and the chrome under the windows on the door but I'm just not sure what the best way to go about it would be since i've never done any car painting before.

I guess my question would be, how do I go about doing all of this? What would be the best way? Any tips would be appreciated since this is really the first time i've painted stuff on a car before.

[Sponsor]

[feta_mgp]

Tape it and plasti-dip it. The chrome beltline is attached, removing it would give you some nastiness underneath. So, just tape it off and plasti-dip it.

That or you can cover it in vinyl, but you'd have to cut it to fit.

[Twenty]

I'd use vinyl for the whiskers and beltline. For the rest, paint.

[Nalza.ziza]

Vinyl is the way to go for the whiskers and the window chrome...

[PoonRacing]

Tape it. it is very common thing to do in Mini Cooper community. here some of the tape I use.

http://www.outmotoring.com/mini-coop...tline-kit.html

[BaconZombie]

I've personally done everything except for the badges, as I can't decide if I want to paint them or just get rid of them. My whiskers are the only thing that are vinyl. I actually remove every piece of chrome trim to wrap it in vinyl, but even after hitting it with the heat gun, after a while the corners started pulling up. So I pulled them all back off and Plast-dipped them. Haven't had any issues since, including the fog light bezels. So my advice would be to Plasti-dip them.




Ugh, look at those sad silver wheels! Sorry for the older pics...

[Bliky]

So, it sounds like from the answers I got I should at least do the whiskers in vinyl. Now, how would I go about doing that? What do I need? Any good tutorials around?

I haven't decided what I'm going to do about the belt line but for the badges I'm either going to remove them entirely or Plasti dip them since that seems to be the easiest way.

If I do decide to paint the fog light bezels or any other part how should I go about that? I haven't really done much painting before, especially on a car.

[darkangelism]

I used plastidip

[BaconZombie]

Like I said, I used Plastidip on everything but the whiskers. The chrome portion of the fog light bezel people off very easily. And Plastidip will definitely hold up better on those.

[feta_mgp]

Originally Posted by darkangelism

I used plastidip

Looks pretty sweet! Eventually I'll plasti-dip mine as well, but that looks great! Probably easier to do that than remove the chrome too.