How to: Paint the '97-'03 grille

[Auburnfan400]

Ok, for those of yall like me, i ended up with the ugly "bar style" stock grille. And after about 5 years of lookin at the old, faided plastic, i decided to paint her black to tie in with the truck. So here's what you do, its very easy. First, you got 1 of 2 choices. Either tape around the grille, and paint it on, or take a little more time, and actually remove the grille from the truck. Bigun took his off i believe, and i left mine on.


Next, take some very fine grit sandpaper, or even an s.o.s. pad or one of those abrasive kitchen scrubbers and just go all over the grille. Basically roughing it up, giving the paint something to stick too.

After that, make sure its clean, no dirt, or bugs still on it, and spray on your desired color. I used Krylon matte black paint, but any spray thats made for plastic will work. Spray on as many even coats as you feel is necessary.



Let it sit up to an hour, till its dry, peel back the tape and there ya go! did mine in May and still looks perfect, if you want a shiny look, go over it with gloss but its really up to personal preference

 

[LightDuty]

I have the honeycomb grille and was wondering how difficult it is to take the grille out because it will be too hard to paint it while its on the truck seeing how i'm going to have to paint it at a bunch of different angles

 

[Auburnfan400]

Dammit hahaha i was hopin nobody would ask that, i remember when i was researching doing this back on the old forum someone put up a diagram on taking them out, and it actually looked pretty involved. Thats why i didn't do it. But message bigun, if i'm not mistaken he took his out when he painted his

 

[ex4banger83]

im thinkin about doin that with my truck...ill have to play around in PS when I have some time...definately gonna go with white to match the truck and get rid of the XL package look

 

[Auburnfan400]

Yea that'll look really good. I wanted to ptm mine but after lookin at pics i decided it better to go with black. But on a white, or black truck, i'd ptm(paint to match)

 

[ex4banger83]

yea...im gonna play around in photoshop sometime to decide if I want to PTM the bumpers and grill...what part of bama are you from?

 

[Auburnfan400]

Hartselle! No frickin way, i didn't even notice where you were from hahahaha

 

[Darth Bama]

I have the honeycomb grille and was wondering how difficult it is to take the grille out because it will be too hard to paint it while its on the truck seeing how i'm going to have to paint it at a bunch of different angles

It's not hard to remove the entire surround. That way you can remove the center section and not worry about having to mask off the grille and hood, bumper etc.

The grille itself is attached with clips that you can pry up a little and push the grille away from them. Nothing to it actually. I think I had mine apart in about 10 minutes. Take your time and carefully remove screws and clips and it will all go back on easy.

 

[Auburnfan400]

Wow, thats simpler than the way they told me back in the day hahaha

 

[Darth Bama]

Wow, thats simpler than the way they told me back in the day hahaha

Nah, there's nothing to it man. I want to say there's like 6 or 8 screws. 2 of them are behind the turn signals and most of the others are underneath the cowling. Remove the cowling and they're all exposed. The hardest thing to it is getting on your back to unclip the 2 lower grille surround clips. The surround with the grille and all will then slide right off towards you.

I didn't have masking tape or anything to mask the surround off with when I painted mine so I decided to just see how hard it was to remove the whole damn thing. I've actually got the same bar grille you have, it's just covered up by the billet grille.