Skip to main content

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.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Timbaland rips off a Demoscene artist

I knew this day would come. The new Timbaland/Nelly Furtado song "Do It" uses a song made in 2000 by Finnish demoscene artist "Tempest" (Janne Suni). It's a 4 channel .mod (the ripoff is from a playback using the C64 SID soundchip). The song was hosted on scene.org's servers (the main repository for all everyones demos and tracked music, etc.). As you might expect, no permission or royalties were paid to Tempest. Just to clarify, we're not talking about some kind of coincidence here. There is no question that this track was used to create the song "Do It". In an interview, Timbaland tries to downplay it, saying things like "he sampled it from a video game". (This track was not written for a video game- it was actually written for the 2000 demoscene music competition, in which it won 1st place). Regardless, he basically claims he has no legal obligations because it's just like all the other pop artists that sample other m
1 comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more

Windows 8 audio clicks and glitches narrowed down to Malwarebytes

Ever since I got my Windows 8 PC, I have been having serious problems with audio.  Basically all sound playback on my system experiences a brief  but frequent click, skip, glitch, stutter, whatever you prefer.  I can reproduce the issue on any sound card or firewire sound interface (devices tested include the onboard Conexant SmartAudio HD, my external Phonic Helix 12, and my Edirol FA-101).  All of them seem to have audio clicks, with the firewire interfaces' clicks seeming more harsh for whatever reason.
3 comments
Read more