» Plasti Dipped the 300zx/Z32

Plasti Dipped the 300zx/Z32

My wife has agreed to let me get a nice, custom paint job for the Wasp if I still have her in two years. So as a temporary fix for some of the paint jobs problems, I decided to “Dip My Car”, or at least parts of her. Plasti-Dip is a type of rubbery spray paint that holds up pretty nicely but can be easily pealed off if you ever want to remove it.

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I started with the cowls and wiper arms. The cowls had lost a lot of the black coating they originally had.

So I took them off, washed them with some Dawn dish soap and water, put them on some newspaper, and sprayed them with Plasti-Dip. The trick to getting the Plasti-Dip to peal off later is to put it on with lots of light layers. I sprayed 6 light coats on.

The above picture is after 3 coats. Like I said, I ended up putting on 6 coats. It came out very nice.. in fact so nice I wished I’d spent a little more time sanding the passenger side cowl as it was pretty bumpy looking. But the nice thing about it being Plasti-Dip, is that I can peal it off and redo it if it bothers me too much.

Here the cowls and wiper arms are back in The Wasp. I’d say the went from a 3 out of 10, to at least a 7 or 8.

Next up, I decided to Plasti-Dip the front bumper cover and the bottom color on my two-tone car. One of the problems I had with the as purchased paint job was that the bottom color of blue didn’t really go well with the azure blue. And to make maters worse, the passengers side was badly chipped showing the lighter blue in many spots.

First I gave the car a good wash, and then spent a good amount of time masking the car. I’ve decided I’m going to “de-chrome” my car, so I tapped just above the top of the silver strip separating the two colors. My goal was to have a sharp line that didn’t show any of the silver when finished.

The bumper cover on the Wasp is not her original and had a bad paint job that didn’t match the rest of the car. It was originally red and lots of red spots showed through. I have been running with a black bra over the bumper cover to hid it. Even though only the bottom part of the bumper cover should be black, since the blue did not match and it had red spots on it, I decided to paint the whole bumper cover black.

After all the masking I rubbed it down with some 90% iso-proply alcohol on a rag to clean off any grime and finger prints.

Here is the front bumper cover masked and with 2 coats of Plasti Dip on it. I took out the turn signals, but the fog lights put up a fight so I just masked over them.

Here is the bumper cover with 6 coats on it.

After waiting an hour for the Plasti Dip to dry I removed all the masking. I’m very happy with how it has come out, and expect that I can now hold out the 2 years for a professional paint job. This project took me about 5 hours to do, and cost around $30. Three cans of black Plasti-Dip, a roll of blue masking tape, and a plastic painters drop cloth.

Here are a couple of pictures with her bra back on. I think I will keep the bra on as it hides the fact that the black goes a lot higher than it should on the bumper cover, as well as the gaps from the poor fitting.