Tips to Make Your Old Trim Match the Rest of Your Restored Car

If you have just painted your hot rod there may be a couple cosmetically bad things you may have noticed about the car that you did not before. Of course you will see drips and things of that nature in the paint, and you will probably see dings you did not see before, but I am not talking about the body, I am talking about the trim work on the windows, your bumper, and everything else that did not get painted. You probably noticed that next to your shiny new paint job that the other elements of the car do not exactly fit anymore. Well do not worry because there are a couple of things you can do to fix these little imperfections.

Most of these parts that were not painted are probably chromed. If they are you will have a harder time fixing the problem then if they were just painted. You might want to remove them if possible and to do that find a copy of a repair manual for your vehicle and look up how to do it. Be extremely careful though because you do not want to scratch the new paint. Once they are off you have a couple of options. You can either get them re chromed, which can cost you a lot of money, or you can paint them instead. If you want to paint the trim work simply scratch and ruff up the surface with 200 grit or finer sandpaper, this will allow the paint to stick without showing deep scratches. Then lay them outside, or in a well ventilated area on top of some newspaper or something that you do not mind getting paint on. Then take a spray can of something that goes well with your cars paint and thoroughly paint them. You can do this with a brush to. I recently painted some bad chrome with aluminum Rustoleum paint and if you do not look at it closely you can't tell it's not chrome. Then replace it once it has dried for the recommended amount of time.

If you can not remove the trim you can sand it where it sits, be very careful though because you do not want to scratch the windows. Then tape everything off and gently paint the trim. I would use a brush, because there is no overspray with a brush, and even though it can leave brush strokes, if you use a painter's style brush and are very careful you can paint it to not look like you have brushstrokes in the paint