So, after the “exciting” adventure that was my attempts at painting, I had the brilliant idea “why don’t I just vinyl wrap the nose section”.
Well, it turns out that while most modern cars are generally fairly shallow curves and flat sections, the HMV Freeway is….. not. I spent probably an hour trying to figure out how to conform a sheet of vinyl to the front without luck. With the protruding nose, and how it blends into the side rail features, you can’t really conform a sheet of material to it.
Anyways, I wound up wasting most of a $60 roll of vinyl, only to throw most of it away. Thinking about it now, I think I can see a way to do the nose section by using multiple vinyl sections, but again, I’m running low on willingness to futz with bodywork at this point.
Currently, I have the nose section coated with vinyl wrap, and some circular dot stickers over the places where paint got ripped off when I removed the previous headlight mounts.
I’ve also moved on from using adhesive tape in addition to the screws to mount the headlights, they currently just have a gasket made of neoprene foam rubber stuck to the underside to help seal them against the body (not that that matters, there’s a lot of other areas which would leak in the rain anyways).
Like most projects where you do something for the first time, I now can think of a bunch of ideas that would (maybe) resolve a bunch of the problems I had.
Ugh.
