Rep Power: 252

I didn't really see a section on the forums for talking about adding graphics or painting cars... so figured here is good.

Ok, I want to take off my pinstripe. It is gold. It looks bad. The car is red with a lot of silver and black. I want to stay with that theme. Now, I already started to remove a small section of the pinstripe which was peeling and when I look close I can see that the paint under the stripe is obviously different. Whether anyone else would notice, probably not. But I know it looks crappy.

So I had been considering getting a pinstripe of some sort painted on. Maybe something wider than the pinstripe to cover the entire width of what was removed. Then I started thinking, I don't know if I want to PAINT it on... so I thought about vinyl. I was thinking maybe a two tone Black and Silver design. I want something subtle and not ricy.

What would you do if you could not afford to paint the whole car and you needed to cover up the area where the pinstripe was?

 
Rep Power: 276

I would buy a paint cleaner or Meguiars ColorX, some foam applicator pads, and some microfiber towels and go to town on it. Most likely with the ColorX you will be able to match enough so that you cant see it if you didnt know it was there. The slap a couple coats of wax on there and your good to go. Painted pinstripes can sometimes be expensive and require a clearcoat. Vinyl pinstripes will get you in the same boat your in now if you decide to change it in the future. Eventually you might have a 10in pinstripe.

 
Rep Power: 252

Cool I'll try that first. I think the car will look great with no stripe, as I've seen some of the other red civics here without them.

As far as getting the stripe painted if I go that route, I can probably get it done cheap. My father in law is into hot rods and he knows EVERYBODY. When we lowered my car he even has a friend that gave us a cheap alignment after hours at the garage. I could probably get the whole car painted fairly cheap too, but no matter how cheap that is it is out of my budget now. It's nice to have connections =)

 
Rep Power: 812

uh painted is very hard to look good. i had them stock and it was okay, but when the body shop tried to match, they totally couldnt do it and i had them just sand it all off.

 
Rep Power: 252

I think I've pretty much decided now that I don't want to paint a stripe on the car. I bought the colorx and am going to try that after removing my gold stripes. If it looks like crap after that still, I will probably get a graphic made to cover it until I can get the whole car painted.