Help my car look less ghetto

July 23, 2005 2:47 PM

Help me decide what to do about the unsightly paint on my Honda Civic's bumper.

So this winter my wife ran our silver 1999 Honda Civic LX into a snowbank. The plastic bumper wasn't damaged, but a bunch of silver paint or coating came off. There's now a rough circle of uncovered black plastic on the right side, which makes the car look pretty ghetto. The paint around it looks like it could just flake off at any time as well, so I'm a bit worried about inadvertently polluting.

I guess my question is, do I need the paint? Could I just strip ALL the paint off the bumper, leaving it black? I have this sinking feeling that if I take it in somewhere they'll charge me an arm and a leg to repaint the thing.

posted by selfnoise to Home & Garden (8 answers total)

I consider all damage to my car to be personality-enhancing "battle scars".

Your worries about polluting are misguided. Step back and look at the big picture. A little paint is amusingly insignificant.
posted by trevyn at 3:04 PM on July 23, 2005

Also: Of course you don't need the paint, but stripping it would make it look even more ghetto.
posted by trevyn at 3:05 PM on July 23, 2005

Honda stocks little vials of the exact batch of paint that was used to paint your car. I'm not talking about just the same color, it's actually paint from the same vat that your car was painted from. I remember it being very inexpensive, under $10 or so. I had bought a vial to fill in this cut i had on my roof. Obviously it wasn't seemless, but you had to look for it.

I'd check it out.
posted by AaRdVarK at 3:08 PM on July 23, 2005

Response by poster: I appreciate the offer, but the paintless bit is about the size of a small pizza. I think a little vial might not cover it. Also: the rest of the bumper paint seems to be interested in coming off, so it might not do much good in the end.
posted by selfnoise at 3:26 PM on July 23, 2005

What you should do really depends on the size of the damaged area. If its more than an inch or so, You could yank the whole bumper off the car and get it painted (i've done this on my car due to a similar altercation with a snowbank)

Assuming the area is small enough to touchup, there are a ton of places on the net you can use as a reference. these instructions are extremely detailed but should make the damage disappear.
posted by freq at 3:27 PM on July 23, 2005

You're not going to have much luck matching that paint, even if what you use came from the same vat as your car was painted from. Silver has the worst colour stability of any car paint - many autoshops don't stock it because if a car is more than 6 months old the new silver won't match what's already there. If it matters that much to you look at getting the whole thing repainted.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 4:50 PM on July 23, 2005

Meh. A decent independent body shop will do a bumper for $200 if you pay cash. It won't match perfectly, but it'll be close enough for an 8-year-old car.
posted by Kwantsar at 7:24 PM on July 23, 2005

Go to your hardware store's spray paint section. You'll find a brand of paint for plastic brand-named "Fusion". Find one that looks approximately like your existing silver color. Spray paint.

Believe me, more than 10 feet away, nobody will ever notice it.

Under $5.
posted by dhartung at 12:12 AM on July 24, 2005