When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
If they have blue....I can't see them not having wood grain.
Now, if I can figure out if they have a black one, I may be making a purchase too.
If you search his name and f150 bezel he has them in lots of colors. Can't remember if he had black but i did find the wood. What I don't understand is does this just bolt up or do you have to cut or glue anything. I looked at the backs of both and they look different.
If you search his name and f150 bezel he has them in lots of colors. Can't remember if he had black but i did find the wood. What I don't understand is does this just bolt up or do you have to cut or glue anything. I looked at the backs of both and they look different.
My truck is a late 2013 the one I bought was a 2012 the only thing I did as it doesn't come with the hill start assist or traction control button is pop mime out and popped into the new one was completely plug and play .
Alright, so not only have I been waging war on chrome on the exterior of the truck, I've also been trying to get rid of the thousand different shades of gray in the STX interior. I'm sure the designers did that to make it look not as good as say an FX4's interior. All black just looks cleaner to me, so I decided to paint a few things. Very subtle accents that just make a huge difference, IMO.
For all speaker grilles, I used Rustoleum semi-gloss black. Just general purpose stuff off the shelf at Home Depot ($4 I think). I was going to use it on some of the door panel trim pieces as well, but it didn't turn out so well and the semi-gloss was overwhelming. In a perfect world, I would've liked to have used the matte I used on the door panels on everything all the way around, but it's really not that noticeable since the grilles are mesh vs. the solid plastic trim pieces.
First up were these:
The A-pillar tweeter grilles. The A-pillars are black, and to me it looked weird with a random gray/silver mesh grille in the middle of it.
Here they are in semi-gloss black:
I think they're much cleaner like this, blends a lot better and isn't such an eye sore anymore. I think I went too thick with the paint, but I may change it to matte to match the other trim pieces you'll see below. Can't tell the difference really when looking at them, but it would make me feel better, lol.
Once I saw how it worked out on the tweeter grilles, I moved onto the speaker grilles. Pics of them are below with the rest of the door panels. The raw white-ish gray color of the speaker grilles were awful and just made the door panel look half-assed.
The door trim panels above the armrest were next on the hit list. They're part of the door panel, but I just cut mine off:
I was careful not to break the clips that are on either side (the one on the right in the picture) as those would be the main things to keep them in place when re-installed. Of course I found the trick to it all when I only had a things left to cut (not sure what you wanna call them - plastic rivets or plastic welds or whatever). If you put 1 thumb on each side of the thing, and hold it with your other fingers on the other side (side that faces you in the truck), just push your thumbs down and it releases itself from the door panel. From there you can squeeze a knife in the gap and cut it off, as I did in the picture. Wish I had thought of it before I was almost done lol, instead I was sticking all sorts of different sized knives in any slot I could find to saw the damn things off.
I figured that semi-gloss I used for the speaker grilles would work fine, but it didn't work out too well. Even though it was semi-gloss, it was still too glossy IMO. The glossiness was pretty uneven too, but that's on me... probably uneven strokes since I was sort of rushing, didn't help I did it when it was about 40 degrees out with a steady breeze - paint kind of got blotchy due to the temp I think.
After I (finally) stripped all of the semi-gloss black paint off, I scuffed it up a bit and cleaned it up. Then I hit it with duplicolor adhesion promoter - I think this made a huge difference in the whole process over my first go around. I did 3 coats of the adhesion promoter, 3 mins in between coats, and I laid down my first light coat of duplicolor vinyl & fabric paint in matte black about 8-10 minutes after the final coat of adhesion promoter. Did 2 more coats of the matte black for a total of 3 coats. Let it cure for probably 30 hours, probably not all that necessary but I wasn't in any rush.
Just a side note, my door handle and the trim around it are in the gloss black that I used on the speaker grilles. I didn't have time to do them, just got lucky with a random warm day here so I did the other trim pieces instead. In the Spring I'll take that door handle bucket out again, get the gloss paint off, and lay down some of the matte black so it will match the trim pieces on both sides of it. It sticks out like a sore thumb, but oh well. Just ignore it.
Here's the before picture with all the gray:
And after with the matte black door trim pieces above the armrest:
The golden yellow accents are vinyl wrap. Fits my Bruins theme perfectly! Oh and the duplicolor adhesion promoter was $12 and the vinyl & fabric matte black paint was $14. So for $26 I'm quite happy. Not trying to make my truck look "pretty" or give it a wicked custom look, just trying to make it look the way I think it should've looked from the factory. I can't expect much with the STX being such a low trim level, but I'm just glad it was easily fixable with a little effort. If I get bored enough next Spring maybe I'll change the speaker grilles to the same matte as well just because I tend to nit-pick and want everything uniform, but it really isn't noticeable at all since they're not right next to each other and just the material being different.. the holes in the mesh kind of break it up so you really don't see much of the semi-gloss.
Last edited by BostonBruins; 12-26-2015 at 11:58 PM.
12-25-2015, 12:57 PM
