Roof Ditch Finisher Resprayed

Continuing with the cosmetic uplifts, after finishing off the wing mirror cap respray, I focused on an area that had been bugging me for a while, the roof ditch finisher.

It's standard practice to tape the areas of the car you want to protect whilst machine polishing, exactly what I did with the roof ditch finisher.

Despite using the right tape for the job, 3M 3434, it still pulled the paint off leaving a shiny silver patch of exposed metal. Against the Sapphire Black paint, it stood out like a sore thumb.



Using a trim puller, I carefully levered the clips loose that were hold the finisher to the roof. In case it rained during the respraying process I taped over the roof rack mount threads with some masking tape.






To do a thorough respray I decided to break the finisher down into it's component parts. Flipping it over you can see the main finisher has two brackets attached to it that hold the roof rack mount access flaps in place.


To remove the brackets, I used a small flat head screw driver to flex the tabs that hold it in place. I was really careful whilst doing this honest, the bracket was this mangled before I removed it, not sure how on earth it got that way though.




Now fully disassembled I could get to work sanding the paintwork. I took the damaged access flap back to metal, but just flatted off the main finisher. Unfortunately I couldn't go hell for leather as the finisher has full length rubber flip seals on both sides. To avoid damaging them I taped them off with some masking tape. Here's both parts prepped for paint.






I followed the same three coat process I used on the wing mirror cap, with the same Halfords rattle can paints. To get an even coverage on the access flaps I rolled up a ball of masking tape and stuck the flap to it, then pressed it onto an old phone box. This elevated it just enough that I could get all the edges without any witness marks in the paint from holding it.



In between coats of paint I decided to go clean up the roof ditch and apply a layer of wax to aid it's water management properties.




I was genuinely quite shocked at the difference correcting this minor paint blemish had on the car as a whole. It transformed the car from looking a bit worn round the edges to properly sorted.


Definitely a worthwhile job without too much hassle either.