Plasti-Dip Chevy Volt Emblems and Rims

Now that I have had my Chevy Volt for a week, I had to take care of some high priority items in order to make it driveable. The first one, of course, was to black out the rims and gold Chevy emblems.

I used a product called Custom Wrap by Dupli-Color. It's the equivalent of a better-known product called Plasti-Dip. You spray it on, and it peels or wipes off when you want it to (assuming you did it right).

Wheels

Started with some serious cleaning of the wheels. I used Simple Green mixed with water, a sponge, and a lot of elbow grease. I chose to remove the wheels for application, but that is not expressly necessary. In my case I didn't want to worry about over-spray onto the car or rotors, and felt I could do a better job of getting all the nooks and crannies. I didn't mask anything at all; I just made sure to do lots of (4-5) coats on everything (including the tires) so it would peel nicely off. The whole wheels job used 2 cans. I put the wheels on top of an old tarp before spraying, because I heard this stuff does not come off of concrete or asphalt. When I was done, I put the wheels on the car and drove it 100+ miles. After that, most of the over-spray onto the tires was gone, and the rest peeled off easily. I am the king of laziness.

Emblems

I took a little more care here and made a basic mask out of cardboard and masking tape. I don't have any photos, but on each I basically sprayed the entire emblem plus a box about 1-2" around them. After it dried I peeled off all of the parts I didn't want blacked out. On the front emblem, I just changed the inner bowtie from gold to black (why does Chevy still insist on having gold logos on a chrome grill?) On the back, I left it fully blacked out so it basically disappears into the black part of the trunk around it.

I am pretty happy with how all this came out. Time will tell as far as how long it lasts, but I hear it becomes pretty stable after one week - you can even take it through a touch car wash with no anxiety.

Comments

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux. Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind. For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS. With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment. It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* favori

An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks). It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc. But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin. To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin

RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server

Scamwagon

Search This Blog