The results (youtube) look great. i would like to try it-it seems too good to be true.
If you have done this, were you happy with the results? Is this something for a professional?
Have you painted a car before? It’s not easy to get it to look perfect. My guess is that if it was easy and cost effective them others would be doing it. I would also assume a professional would have to do it, and that the cost of materials won’t be as cheap as paint… but I have never done it before myself.
I had a roommate that did it. He had a yellow Toyota jeep thing and decided he wanted it black. He did it himself and it came out nice. I wouldn’t expect it to last long term, he didn’t either. At six months was the last time I saw it and it was still holding up fine. It has the advantage if you get sick of it or if you mess it up you can just peel it off and start again.
I’ve seen a few cars at work done up this way. it looks OK at a distance, but up close you see all of the entrapped “stuff” which got stuck in the plasti-dip.
If you look around online you will find that many, many people have done it themselves, it is WAY easier and more forgiving than actual paint for an amateur, and the materials are WAY cheaper than actual good-quality automotive paints.
That is not to say there aren’t cheap paints out there, or that a professional could do a better job, but an amateur can get solid results at a very reasonable price with Plastidip/Plasticote. An amateur trying to spray real automotive paint will have to do a great deal of research, spend a lot of time and money in prep and materials, and have a lot of luck to get a decent-looking result.
There is info scattered on various car forums, but one place for consolidated and specific info is here at http://www.dipyourcar.com/
I know of 2 people who have plasti-dipped their rims and the both look pretty good. I’ve seen picture of entire cars that have been “dipped” and they usually look decent enough. As mentioned, the great thing is if you mess it up you can just peel it off.
It looks great! For exactly 1 photoshoot. It’s textured so it’s hard to clean, it gouges easily, and it can be hard to get good coverage around things like spoilers and door handles. The nice thing is that it’s easy to peal off, but my friend who did it said he’d never do it again, it was a miserable job.
It would be, like, incredibly awesome if you would, maybe, just once, provide the link to what you’ve been looking at when you start one of these threads, ralph.
It wouldn’t be a lot more expensive to have a full wrap applied by a graphics shop. It could even be all one color or something.
I’m not familiar with this particular product, but the spray paints that are specifically marketed as automotive can work pretty well IF you do a good job on the prep work. But that somewhat defeats the purpose because the cost of a professional paint job is mostly the labor, especially for the prep work. Some body shops will let you do the prep work yourself and spray the car for really cheap (think the old $200 Maaco specials) which’ll give you better results for not much more than the rattle-cans would cost.
But it looks like that Plastidip stuff goes right on over the factory paint, so that would certainly change things a bit if it works.
This is the part to consider when trying any DIY car painting. There’s been another thread with this discussion, wet paint on a car magically attracts anything that can stick to it.
AT the hospital that I work with, Security had that done. I couldn’t believe it until I went up and saw the edge of the interior of the door. Looks blamed great.
Sure, but they intend to redo it every year, and barely getting above idle around a hospital, they are hardly going to get much tar or other petroleum or paint or solvent sprayed on it … You get all that out on the real roads… If it was on the plastic coat (whether the plastic got there as paint or as a sheet, eg 3m wrap),
Getting those off the plastic will be tricky… You could probably tolerate a years worth of build up and then try to clean it… and find you may as well remove or replace…