Painting F150/Blackfoot grill

[bholio]

I've started to try to paint my brand new chrome grille on my blackfoot. This does not look easy. I'd really like to make it as accurate as possible. I've started by priming the the body-color stripe. I still have to think about how to go about doing all of the black paint inside the grille and around the lights.

Does anyone have any tips? I'm most concerned about having to sand off the chrome from the parts I want to paint. Is there any paint which will stick to the chrome? Or can anyone recomment a good dremel attachment for sanding?

[Shodog]

I have a real 1985 ford 150 truck. The paint color used on the grill isn't black. It is more of a graphite dark grey color. My truck has the grey color around the headlights and turn signals. the grill has geay on it also but all of the grey ridges are left chrome. I have thought long and hard about this portion of painting on my blackfoot. It looks like the best way would be with a brush or taping everything off and using an airbrush set at a low psi.

[mr_lister999.]

I just opted to paint mine graphite colour with a metalic silver using the dry brushing technique to highlight the grill. This is when you put a little paint onto a brush, rub that onto some absorbant paper (eg toilet roll) until most of the paint is off. This leaves you with almost dry paint on the brush. Stoke this over the grill (or anthing else that needs highlighting) and the paint will start to build up. Repeat this until you get the desired effect. A soft brush is best.

I hope that was clear enough to understand

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If practice makes perfect, and no one is perfect, why practice?

[volksrod68]

Hi mate.

What i did on my old blackfoot shell was to paint the grille 'inserts' to the best quality i can with brush paint on a fine brush, do a few at a time, then on the raised edges, wipe any excess paint from them with a rag dipped lightly in white spirit/thinners.

Wipe a few times until the paint edges are near perfect.

hope that helps

Joe

[bholio]

Thanks for the advice.

No one has mentioned anything about sanding the chrome off first. Do I need to do that? I did take some sandpaper to the one part I started painting. Doing this inside the grille is going to be very difficult.

Nice page showing Ford trucks thru the years.

http://www.ford-trucks.com/pictorial/1981.html

[Shodog]

I don't think you would need to sand off the chrome. As long as the surface is oil and mold release free, the paint should stick fairly well. I painted the grill details on my old juggy with Tamiya semi gloss black spray paint and I never had any problems of it flaking off

[bholio]

Well, I painted it.

The body-colored stripe (where I scraped off the chrome and used primer) came out pretty good.

The inside edges around the lights came out so so. The paint didn't really want to stick that well for some reason, but it sort of looks a little plasticky, which makes it stand out from the chrome.

The inside of the grille was alot easier than I expected. I painted it flat black and tried to keep the front edges (chrome) clean. I still need to remove a little paint from the front grille edges. I did simply paint over the smaller-grille lines. Only the main vertical and horizontal ones are still chrome.

The hardest part was seeing what I was doing. The chrome reflects so much that it was really hard to see where the paint is going. On the other hand, imperfections in the paint are harder to see because any missed-spots pick up a reflection from the correct color somewhere else. This is especially true inside the grille.

I need to do one more coat of paint and it should be done.

The only other question is what to do with the headlights. They look wrong being the exact same color as the bumper. So, I painted one white. It looks better than the unpainted one, but not quite right.

Overall, it's coming out better than I expected. I'm generally really bad at this type of stuff. Too impatient.

[Blue-Eyed Blackfoot]

There is a lot of variation in the grills of 1980-1986 Ford pickups (the Blackfoot and F-150 Ranger, by the way, are 1980 or 1981 models). Some of these trucks had chrome headlight buckets and/or the graphite-gray grill, so paint how you like! You could also make a wash of flat black and thinner (try 30% paint and 70% thinner at first; if the mix isn't quite right, you have too much paint) and brush it on after you've painted the grill insert. It'll setle in the areas beneath the grill detail. I'll use this technique when painting my new shell, and I'll be writing an article about it...just give me enough time to gather up the parts, please!