Okay, I decided last week that I wanted to see what Bergey would look like with blacked out grille slats. NAMmies gave me a good tip on which vinyl tape would be best, and today I spent a couple of hours doing the work.

It was tougher than I though... grille slats are curved and that makes for some minor bunching of the vinyl. If you're within 5 feet of the car, you can see some imperfections. If you know how OCD I am, you know this drives me nuts. I'll probably go ahead and get an aftermarket black grill insert soon.

Here's the before shot for those who don't remember what he looks (looked) like:



It's nice and warm today but not sunny, so these pics may not look as good, but focus on the overall appearance with the blacked out slats:







Opinions of all shapes and sizes are welcome !

 

I think it looks great.

 

use a hair dryer to stretch the tape looks good

 

It looks great! I taped mine almost a year ago and the tape is holding up really well (pepboys...don't remember the brand).

The good thing about taping is that you can always redo it if it gets scratched up or you just want it to look new again....or if you want to go back to chrome.

Great work!

 

thanks, all.

Ricbow, not sure why I didn't think of the hairdryer. I use it to remove stripes, it only goes to figure it would stretch the vinyl enough to go around the slight curves of the grille slats.

I am probably going to replace the grille sometime in the coming few months. I'd love to get the Hamann grille, but I'd have to figure out what to do about the middle grille.

 

That was a good tip, always use a hairdryer when laying vinyl. But, it's not a total loss yet. A few days of sitting will typically smooth out small bubbles and imperfections. FWIW, it looks pretty good from this distance!

 

looks great!!!
nice subtle change

 

Thanks, REW and Malcon.

Subtle must be right. I did that this morning while my S.O. was out for a while. When she came back, I asked her if she liked what I did to my MINI and she looked at it for about 10 seconds and said, "you changed out your grille badges".

 

looks great, I was always a fan of the black grill slats

 

that looks awesome

 

Yea, I like it alot

 

Thanks, everytime, Sax, and Jay !

Jay, I haven't seen you or Stacey in a while... hope all is well.

 

Looks great!!!

 

Muchas Gracias !