Hey let's restore that old hood ornament!

INEEDAGN

Seen Your Member
Joined
Feb 28, 2003
Pop quiz: You got half an hour left on your lunch break and you just pulled this ratty lookin' turbo hood ornament out of the junkyard yesterday, what do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO!?

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Well, you grab a razor blade, hold it perpendicular to the surface, and scratch that acrylic down until the cracks are gone. Go around the edges good and slow, try not to leave too many chatter marks, and watch the chrome, Jerome!

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Then you take some 400 wet paper, wait, dammit you have no 400 paper all you can find is some used 600 wet paper. That'll have to do, you only have half an hour, no time to search for paper. Wet sand the hell out of it, now's the time to waste a bit of time making sure all the chatter marks are gone, etc. Make lots of new edges on the paper and turn the paper often to get the edges real good and smooth. Pause for photo op:

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Now find some 1000 grit, well damn there's none of that either, settle for 1500 and wet sand twice as long, close enough. Follow that up with 2000 grit and pause for photo op again:

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Now grab the 3" buffer, there's a used/dirty yellow foam pad on it. That'll work! Dab some Meguiar's diamond cut on it and buff the hell out of it, slowly, and use lots of compound because if you burn it you get to start all over again. When that's done, grab any old chrome polish off the shelf and make the chrome look a little better. You've overrun your lunch break slightly but you kinda hate your job anyway and you just made a crappy hood ornament look a LOT better. Imagine what you could do to it if you cared...

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Tomorrow I'm gonna do the other side and then I will put it on the car to save my nice one until my kids stop having a fascination with it as they walk by my car in the mornings.

This post is Turbo Farm West approved
 
If the clear over the buick would survive the heat a little semi gloss powder would do nice in the letters
 
You can also use tooth paste and a wet cloth instead of the buffer. I've actually used this on my watch and the lense came out really clear.;)
 
If you don't have a buffer the toothpaste might work to polish it out after the wet sanding, but if you look at the cracks in the first pic, I think you'd be there awhile unless you grind it down smooth. I thought about heat gunning the acrylic to see if it would re level but sanding it out worked good. Its done now and looks a whole lot better, I might touch up paint the letters to hide the pitting, and I have a regular regal ornament base that I might swap because the chrome is a lot better, but I ran out of damn to give about it for the time being. No ones gonna look at it anyway except the usetaboost, he likes this car for some reason.

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Turns out that the base needs swapped anyway, I got this off an 82 and the base is different.

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Not too shabby considering its basically free. Keeps the good one out of daily driver hell. Notice I swapped bases with an 84 limited crest I got the same day.
 
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