Painting mirror cap

lrymal · August 16, 2003

Gee, what a fun $30,000 truck this thing is. Keeps draining my wallet with all the toys.

This next thing is not particularly expensive. I'm wanting to paint my exterior mirror caps. I'm becoming pretty good at this painting plastics stuff.

Does anyone know how to remove the mirror caps? No way I'll do this unless I can figure out how to pull the caps off of the mirror bodies. Thanks!!!

Champion201 · August 16, 2003

They actually just pull off but they are held with some super strong double sided tape and little alignment tabs. The way I got mine off was to pull slowly on the upper corner closest to the door.

I personally just replaced my chrome ones with some that came from the factory painted onyx black to match my truck. I cant remember the name of the guy I got em from right off hand. I'll look around to see if I can find the information. Email me to remind me.

Mike

lrymal · August 16, 2003

Gotcha... thanks! I did a slight prying at the body corner and it began to come up. Figured out how to do it and will put this into a future project. Am thinking about painting the cap with the same color as my body, not sure though. Appreciate your input!

gmcjoe · August 18, 2003

I painted my covers too

I started them and used a 1.5" putty knife to cut the adhesive strips and carefully pull each of the 4 plastic tabs loose from the mirror assy. Take your time and try not to break the tabs

lrymal · August 18, 2003

I painted my covers too

Paint them the same color as your truck body???

Am in no rush to do this since I'd probably be the only one who would notice the modification, anyway. Just kinda bugs me. Wish my neighbor with his chrome mirror covers on his '02 (who would yawn over such a project), would let me swap, but that wouldn't work. I know him too well.

Regarding peeling the OEM cover off... I did that yesterday to see how to do it and it is just standard 3M tape holding the cover on. I have a roll of that so no problem there.

Did you sand your cover down, or use an adhesion promoter fill-in type spray and then do some light sanding. There's a number of ways of painting plastics for high gloss. Just curious to know what others have done when painting the "pebble" type plastic surface, prior to the actual paint application. I'm thinking of using the fill-in adhesion promoter.