After doing some looking around I couldn't find a company that offered a dark gray bedliner spray that would match the factory bumper/fender flares/grille. The grays I found were either like a dove gray or a battleship gray which are quite a bit lighter. I really wanted to stay with an OEM+ look. Everyone out there does black bedliner on their stuff, so I thought it would be really nice to try and keep the OEM gray color.
I wanted something I could find easily without having to go through a bunch of hoops in the case of scraping or scuffing the bumpers or rock sliders and needing to touch it up. Had I gone a custom gray textured powdercoat it would mean having to remove the parts from the vehicle and take them to get re-powdercoated without an easy way to just touch it up. I didn't want to have to do that as it's a huge chore, and costly for simple touch ups.
I decided that I would just bedliner the parts, then paint on top with the appropriate factory color. After doing some research I found the grille factory color was dark gray metallic, which made sense because that's the same color the 3M vinyl I got was for the rear emblem and it was a nearly perfect match. You can get it in Duplicolor Color Match spray cans from the parts stores as well, so it's easy to find. For the bedliner I went with Rustoleum Pro Grade black bed liner as I had just used it on a customer's steel bumpers for his Ranger and love how it sprayed and the texture it gave, and it's also easy to get locally from a lot of different stores too.
I decided I would start with the hood vents. The thing that bugged me about them is that they are the textured plastic and they had faded, so they no longer matched the matte black hood graphic. I pulled them off, scuffed them with a gray scuff pad, wiped them down with paint thinner and let them dry, and then hit them with 2 coats of bedliner followed by 3 light coats of the dark gray metallic paint. I decided to hit the front and back as well. When they were drying I took the chance to hit the area under them on the hood with some rubbing compound and wax to clean it back up. Also, I noticed the clips that held the vents to the hood had a foam washer on them that had turned into dust, so I went to the hardware store and bought some rubber washers to replace it.
Everything turned out awesome. I also pulled the grille and stripped it down to start painting it tomorrow. So far 1 can of bedliner and 3/4 can of paint has done the front and back of the hood vents, so it should be relatively inexpensive to paint all the stuff I want to do. I'd imagine I'll end up somewhere around 100 bucks in supplies to do everything. It'll also save me multiple trips to the powder coating shop as well!
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