my morning commute is blinding me! the glare off the hood scoop is driving me nuts. where can i get a black vinyl hood wrap for my TE?

thanks

Carbon Fiber Wrap...

I've had my TE for two months now and the glare off of the scoop is one of the first things I noticed. I've looked into two wrap options. One is the vinyl, but I have been warned that it is not too UV stable and will only last about two years. The other is the clear chip protection film, which is urethane and far more UV stable. But being clear, it doesn't offer too much glare elimination. Last night I was at the Dallas New Car Show and spoke to someone demonstrating the film and they offer an opaque version that is still clear, but provides a flat finish. I plan to call the guy next week (his shop is only about two miles from my home) and look into the opaque film.

Just don't wash it or wax it. Problem solved.

Go to the bottom of this thread, Harper7's post. Good luck, be safe.

Hood breather scoop mod

I was thinking about doing my hood....


PlastiDip a WHOLE CAR - How-to by DipYourCar.com - YouTube

Check out Harpers rig, he wrapped his whole hood.

I drive a silver TE, which is probably the colour that's going to reflect the most light and I wash and wax it pretty regularly too. I don't really notice any glare from the scoop but I also wear polarized sunglasses. If you don't want to change the appearance of your truck try getting sunglasses with good polarized lenses - Oakley, Smith, Maui Jim, or something like that.

Polarized lenses don't reduce glare off metal surfaces as metal surfaces mostly reflect non-polarized light.

This is a great resource! I hadn't seen this site before. Fonzie's videos definitely make it seem less intimidating and less time-consuming to plasti-dip parts. Looks like I can do all of the chrome on my truck without taking anything off.

thanks for the info about the wraps.

intruder... nice avatar. i fish quite a bit myself. recently hit the norcal coast for some great steelhead fishing on several rivers. when the eastern sierras open the end of april i will be chasing trophy trout for the next six months. i do a lot sight fishing and really like costa del mar 580 polarized glasses. check em out, they are sweet!

recommend not doing it out of the spray can. it WILL tiger stripe. get some thinner and the interior spray gun like he uses. will look tons better. i've already done my SR5's chrome bits with plastidip. looks 100% better.

Search Results | U.S. Plastic Corp.

I just did my truck yesterday and there are to "tiger stripe" issues if you apply enough coats. I was impressed with how easy it was to prep and then remove the excess (provided overspray was thick enough...). I did the SR5 logos first to test it out, and the intentional overspray pulled right up and left the SR5 logos painted. So, I went whole hog and started spraying everything else.

Here are some pictures of it in progress (and the prep work). Obviously I didn't feel like pulling and re-mounting the Gobi ladder, so I left that in place and taped over it. I had no issues getting all the angles I needed with the ladder in place.









Here is the fog light assembly after I removed the tape, but before I removed the overspray. Notice that I sprayed everything including the lens. One thing I would have done differently is oversprayed more into the cracks between the original chrome housing and the bumper because I had to pull a dental tool to scrape a lot of the thinner spray out.



You can see here that it was a bit breezy yesterday, so I had some overspray beyond the tape. This was very simple to cleanup: take a rag and rub it off! It comes off easily like dried mud in areas like this.



Here's the finished product:



Overall, the door handles were by far the easiest to prepare, paint, and clean even though I thought they would be the most difficult. Overspray is easy to pull around the edges and stray overspray is easy to wipe since it doesn't have any crevices in which to hide. I think next time I do it I will leave larger areas to pull the overspray on every facet and ensure that I paint the entire non-taped area evenly rather than focusing on the part to be painted. On the side chrome and the foglight assemblies I was most focused on painting the part itself and the overspray wasn't thick in some areas which was a pain in the ass to clean-up. I learned this lesson by the time I was ready to paint the rear emblem, so that went much more smoothly.

Lastly, I used 1.75 cans of Pasti Dip for this application spraying an average of 5 coats on each part. The spray cans are easy to use and they spray evenly for about 3/4ths of the volume of the can. Once you start getting to the bottom the spray becomes inconsistent and you need to switch to a new can. But, you can easily spray all of the chrome bits on a 5th Gen using two cans.

Looks great Mike!

Looks good Mike, I have a TE so not as much chrome to paint. I also did the Toyota emblems on the hub caps. You can just pop them off and then you dont have to worry about any overspray. The little chrome emblems are just held on by 4 little clips that push out.

I second making sure your oversprayed areas are thick as the thin stuff sucks to remove but the thick stuff comes right off. Dont worry about taping off close to the parts either as that just makes clean up harder.