Friday, April 1, 2022

Restored DeLorean rear quarter louvre

While I was in the process of painting the rear louvre that goes over the engine, I decided to also try and restore the look of the louvres located in the rear quarter panel on each side of the DeLorean. Mine were faded from black to gray and I felt this small improvement would help the look of the car.

Before doing anything, I taped off the louvre so as to protect the stainless rear quarter. This job can easily be done with the rear quarter panels still on the car. If you are going to be taking off the rear quarters for another reason, you could remove the rear quarter louvres then, but I wouldn't recommend removing the rear quarter panel just for this job. Here is the start of my tape job before I did anything to restore the louvre. Notice how gray it looks:


 After taping everything off, I took the same approach as the rear sunshade/louvre, which was to sand them down with 400 grit to get exfoliate the top layer of faded plastic. I then wiped them down with acetone to get them nice and clean.

I then applied several coats of SEM 39143 Trim Black over the next couple of days. I took my time and applied fairly thin coats, even though this pain is extremely forgiving:


Here is the final look. I am very happy with how much better it looks. I used this same paint in the rear pontoon several years ago and have been very pleased with how well it has held up all these years. I suspect that this will look nice for many years to come.



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