Painting Facias

One of my projects for the DeLorean this winter was to repaint the front and rear facias. I removed both facias and trucked them over to two local paint shops for quotes. Each shop quoted $450 for the pair just to paint over the existing paint. And because the facias already had several layers of paint on them they would not guarantee that they wouldn't crack when I tried to reinstall them back on the car. One shop said they could partially sand them but that was another $200 and he still would not guarantee them. That's when I decided to do the painting myself.

The first task was to try and straighten the eyebrow over the one headlamp. This was accomplished by heating the warped area with a infrared spotlight like you have in bathroom ceiling heaters. Once the area was quite warm and soft I clamped two pieces of wood across the warped area to straighten it and removed the lamp and let it sit overnight. In the morning I removed the splints and had a straight fascia. To further prevent the warping from returning some people recommend gluing a piece of aluminum flat bar to the inside.

The next task was to remove the several layers of paint on each fascia. I used Parks Pro Stripper furniture paint stripper. Methylene Chloride is the active ingredient that removes the paint. The trick is to not let the paint stripper sit on the bare plastic so you need to wash it off before it can attack the plastic fascia. This took several days of applying chemicals, scrubbing off paint, reapplying another coat of chemicals and scrubbing off paint. Finally got down to bare plastic.