Civic Spoiler Painted
About 8 months ago (around October/November) I acquired a spoiler for my Civic (’97, HX Coupe, 5 spd, ~172k mi). Now, I love my Civic. I mean, I LOVE it. I don’t have any misconceptions about how fast/not fast it is, but it is a lot of fun to drive, it handles very well, and no matter how I drive it, I’ve never seen lower than 28 mpg, and that was the only fill up I’ve seen below 30 mpg. I’ve done a few things to the car to make it more enjoyable without “ricing” it up, such as putting Integra GSR seats in that match the Civic’s interior (dark grey seats in a lighter grey interior), as well as fabricating my own front struct brace. But that’s another story for another day.
I always felt that my car was lacking a spoiler, so when I got an opportunity to pick up one for $30 and the old Panasonic radio from my wife’s CR-V, which we had no use for, I jumped at it. It’s a fairly generic spoiler, but I figured if I took the time to paint it well it would look above average. I painted all the plastic pieces, but left the metal pieces as they were. They were the mounting brackets, which were bare aluminum, and the small bolts and surrounds for the bolts that hold the sides of the spoiler to the main blade, which were chrome. However, after the winter I noticed that the aluminum brackets were beginning to oxidize (which I expected) and rust was coming out of the chrome surrounds (which I did not expect). I decided to take the whole thing back apart, and paint the metal pieces black, as most of my car is either red or black. I liked the idea of having a two-tone color scheme on the spoiler itself, as that also matched the car. To further push the red/black scheme, I decided to paint the emblems as well.
First things first, I made sure I had all the materials needed. I already had some self-etching primer and clear coat from painting the spoiler, but I had to go out and buy some black paint. There’s an Auto Zone about 2 minutes down the road, so I took care of that.
It’s great living near my parents. It’s even greater that my dad has a wide variety of tools which I can use. I removed the emblems from the car. The Civic and HX emblems were simply taped to the car, and in the heat of the day they removed easily. The Honda “H” logo was both taped and pin-mounted on the back, and just pin-mounted on the front. Once I removed those, I got to work on the spoiler. **Click on any picture to access the set on my Flickr, there are more pictures there as well**
This is what the spoiler looked like before I painted it. You can see that I’ve already removed the emblems. There was a lot of crap under there, it took me a while to clean it out. Oddly enough, the front one was darn clean underneath.
After removing the spoiler, I simply disassembled the whole thing, scuffed and cleaned all the pieces, and then primed them:
After priming the pieces, I ended up letting them sit for about 16 hours as it began to rain outside. I then painted them with black automotive paint, and applied a clear coat. That funny piece of cardboard in the upper left is all the various bolts in the thing, punched through cardboard so that only the heads are painted. This is a trick I’ve learned from the paint dept. at work.
And that’s the finished product. I’m very happy with how everything came out! The front Honda “H” logo doesn’t really pop, though, as it’s black on a grey grill. I knew it wasn’t really going to pop much, but now that I see it in person, I’m even less satisfied with it than I expected. I’ll probably paint it red once a few weeks have gone by and the paint has had time to really cure.
My next project is fabricating a strut brace for the back (I’ve already fabricated one for the front) and painting both the front and back braces. Stay tuned…
