For the New Year, something a bit different. A friend and I was talking about what we can do with the Rubber Paint we bought. And it happens that he wanted to have the grill of his new Nissan NV350 Urvan painted silver. So after I tested the paint we chose on the interior detail of my Almera, we went ahead and painted the grill of the Urvan.
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| Image taken from Nissan PH Web Site |
Plasti-dipping is not something new. There's even a dedicated channel on how to use the product. In the country, Plasti-Dip is sold in True Value and Handy Man at around 700 (for the basic solid color) to 1000 (for the metalizers). These colors are limited in these stores, and we have no time to go to Pasay or other branches to get a silver one. Instead, we opted to use Carlas Rubber Paint, available at your local Blade or Concorde for 500 bucks.
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| nope. this is a non-advertorial post |
Carlas is also like plasti-dip, in that it's a peelable rubber spray paint. Colors depend on the branches, but the most colors we found were on EDSA Shangri-La branch of Concorde. They have 2 types of silver, a sparkly silver and what we have, which is plain silver. Since we want to maintain the look of the vents, we masked those off. Technically you don't need to since if done properly, it'll separate at the seams. Since the product is not the name brand, we went in with the masking, just in case.
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| masked using regular masking tape |
Masking is always the time consuming part. Especially if you want to have the edges right. It helps if you use actual painter's tape, instead of the normal white one. We have an exacto knife to cut away the tape in the grill. After masking. we cleaned the grill with a clean cloth and alcohol and started the mist coat.
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| If you can do it in a sunny dust free environemnt, it'll be better |
Followed by several wet coats. Note the distance between the can and the object. If it's too far, it'll form a rough texture (which happened). If to near, it might run. You basically spray in in a nice even motion. If you have the gun attachment for spraycans, it'll make life easier. we went with 6-8 coats. A minimum of 4 is what I'd recommend.
End result is...
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| Tadaa |
It went from looking like a base variant, to one variant up (minus the wing mirrors). We waited 20 mins before removing the mask (we were impatient). Some of the paint did not separate as intended, leaving some of the enges with the paint pulled off, so I'd recommend waiting longer. 30 mins according to the can.
Some tips:
1. Spray in a well lit area. Head lights of another car does not give you enough visibility on coverage.
2. After the mist coat, make sure that the next coat is a wet coat. If sprayed too far, it leaves specks, which results in a rough surface.
3. wait for 30 mins to dry before unmaking/peeling. More coats = easier peeling. Cure time is 8 hours.
4. Be patient. Do not rush the paint job like I did.
As for the Carlas, it's pretty good. It's not advertised as much, but the end result is pretty decent if done correctly. If plasti-dip is too expensive, I would recommend Carlas as a substitute for cheap rubber paint for DIY stuff.
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