DD_545i

Some extra closer-up pics.

Ghostteck

Wow looks really good the closes ups look smooth and clean no bumps nothing nice

Speed_Force_E60

hmmm on second thought, paint looks better... but wont last as long. Good Job holmes!

DD_545i

True, on the not necessarily lasting so long. I went into this knowing that if I keep the car more than a year, then I might have to put in another hour of touch-ups. Thing is though, even if the paint comes off in parts and I have to rework it, there's no way it'll look as bad (for my personal taste) as having the full chrome did I don't hate chrome, or think people who have it have no taste, I just don't like it on my cars.

It really pisses me off that the German manufacturers actually charge about ?500 for shadowline when you order a new car. Like black trim costs more than chrome trim. It should be the other way around if you ask me

So glad e60.net has email notifications. I thought this thread had been deleted. I lost it. No doubt some moderator moved it to the arse-end of the world where it can't be found.

Speed_Force_E60

+1

bimmer530iguy

You should have taken more precaution and instead of doing it on the car, taken the trim off the car (took me 20mins when installing high-gloss trim bought from Garry) and then painted them, well anyways it came out well, but I would never paint directly on my car.

DD_545i

Funny, I thought exactly the opposite. I looked at that very nice write-up someone made here of how to take the trim off. That looked some scary shit to me. It seemed a lot safer to do it on the car. No risk of damaging the trim or spoiling/breaking the rubber seals. Each to his own I guess

DD_545i

Well, I made a mistake spray painting my chrome trim. I was warned many times (lots of the warnings on here), but it's such a cheap option I had to give it a try. I initially did a great job if I say so myself. I know when I've done a bad job of something, and in this case I was quite proud that I'd done it well. For a few weeks it looked fantastic, as good as original shadowline I think. One month after doing it, I made a big trip of about 2,500 miles to England and back. That's more than a quarter of my yearly miles in that annual trip back home. It was during that trip that I noticed little flecks of chrome starting to peek through. I hadn't even abused it with car washes either, or driven at super high speed (I'm on 130mph winter tires). I was told to use a lacquer spray for the final coat(s) but I didn't have any. Maybe that would have been all that was needed. After several minor touch-ups I'd done over the last month or so, it was starting to look bad though - it was too late, only one option remained.

Last week I finally gave up and ordered the proper shadowline trim from my local dealer and had them installed yesterday when they did my software upgrade.

Happy now though :-)

edit: oh crap, the mods seem to have moved this thread to the ass-end of the world. I imagine nobody will see this. Oh well.

John@Motorcepts

shouldve put primer too

DD_545i

That would have helped too. Now I know on my next one, if it doesn't already have shadowline, I'll just go ahead and pay for it to be replaced properly To do the job well, you have to take the trim off, prime it, paint it, lacquer it and put it back on, and even then it won't be as good as the original part.

I'm just glad it only cost me $10 and a few hours of masking/spraying to find out the hard way