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Body Work

The first part of your car to show age is the body.

You get dings and scratches in parking lots, UV from the sunlight fades and discolors paint, even if your car doesnt have any rust damage you can end up with all kinds of problems from having the car exposed to the weather for years.

Clear coat eventually peels off, things all over the car make it look, well, like an old car.

Now how does one fix all this?

With the Dynasty I have found a few problems and potential solutions. I am no expert, so use at your own risk & judgement.

First, I noticed alot of the black trim, like on the fenders, wiper blade area, side mirrors, rear bumper fade from the sunlight over time. These once gloss black sections turn grey and flat as they age. Your car can literally look younger if you can bring back their original shine & shade of black.

Now how?? Well you have two main methods, remove these parts from your car, or tape the near by parts of the body off- and paint them. Use very light sanding to smooth out and roughen the surface of these plastic pieces so that the paint can grip better- and use either a decent gloss black spry paint, or a spry paint specifically designed to bond to plastics.

Next- that fake chrome. Chrysler sure uses alot of it in this era. Side moldings, bumper trim- its everywhere. Its just vinyl or plastic coated with a thin chrome colored sticker (for lack of a better word). This has two main problems with time- 1) fading (can turn into a flat silver) or 2) the fake chrome coating can peel off!

The fix? The *best* you can do for it is peel off the fake chrome and protective clear plastic layer off so you are down to the vynil layer. You can then lightly sand that vynil and paint it black to match your black trim OR you could always be creative and paint it gold or whatever color you think would look good.

Here is how I did the rear trim on my Dynasty (see pics below):

First, this (above) is what I had to work with. Note how faded the trim had become by the rear license plate, the fake chrome strip above was peeling and distorted, there were ugly bumper stickers on the rear end- what a mess!

So I peeled off the bumper stickers, two of which had damaged my black trim so I sanded it down until it was smooth. The yellow spots are actually the layer of plastic under the black dye used at the factory. I also peeled off the clear plastic protective layer and chrome colored layer of the fake chrome trim. What you see above is unsanded vynil.

Here is a better view, you can see how grey some of that black trim has become and what that vynil layer looks like pre-sanding. I then sanded it, masked the rest of the car and had at it with some Krylon fusion black paint that is designed to bond to plastic. I ended up with:

Here is the finished product.

An other view.

All in all much better than before. I eventually did the rear fenders' trim as well. Later I have yet to do the side mirrors and the front fender trim.

Not bad for a $10 restoration job.