Thread: 03 infiniti fx35 w/all the toys, add a carpc too? oh yeah... :)

Originally Posted by turbocad6

yeah, I can't stand to see most cars that someone just paints a bunch of interior stuff just for the sake of painting it, most interior paint work looks like dog crap, I'm picky & I wouldn't do that, I would just do the existing aluminum trim, that's it, & of course this center bezel... it's when you start adding the window switch bezels & the cluster bezels & try to paint anything & everything is when it gets horrible, what I have in mind will look nice, just hesitant cause the console will be much more likely to get scuffed or marred easily, where now it's low maintanance brushed aluminum, which by the way looks real nice, another reason for me hesitating to paint it all

why not just cast your new bezel in aluminum? I am sure it could be done. Cover the existing plastic in clay, fire, smelt, pour, cool, sand, done.

how are you going to do the vents or are you just enlimating them?
Great install btw you are undoutly a master fabricator!!!

i was trying to come up with a way to re-fab the vents in my galant (r.i.p.) and I found some abs slats that would have worked. Interested to see your solution to that part of it.
My little brother tried to paint a bunch of stuff on his old saturn, got a can of the trim paint, and painted anything that could be removed with simple tools. Once he put it all back together it looked like S*** almost like a smurf sneezed blue snot here and there... What's even funnier, is some dude at his work saw it and thought it was a special edition or something and wanted to buy the car from him because of it...

the vents I came up with a solution, I will make the vertical slats from plastic, I found a magazine rack that has just the right curve for this, the radius of the outside edge is pretty curved, but the inner edge closer to the screen is more or less straight, the slats I have are curved more than even the outer curve of the bezel, so the center protrudes slightly, hard to explain but it looks cool. one rack does 2 slats, I may do 3 in each opening so the oe center button can go on a center slat, if I do only 2 in the opening, then there is no center slat, just an inner & an outer, it then doesn't look right.

the first signs of a kiddie car is a bunch of painted interior stuff, that & the blue bulbs in the headlights, kinda goes with the 6" exhaust tip on a 4cyl with a giant wing

Originally Posted by 2k1Toaster

why not just cast your new bezel in aluminum? I am sure it could be done. Cover the existing plastic in clay, fire, smelt, pour, cool, sand, done.

I thought about sending a template to one of those places that make the stick on dash pieces, they make an aluminum overlay for the stock dash, maybe they could do one for this, but for the most part that stick on crap looks like , well, crap

I also thought about making a mold of this piece, it took so much work to make it, it'd be cool to make a reproduction with a mold, but theres like no one who would change there whole dash to do this to there truck, & the newer trucks with this newer style dash have a newer control system too, so this wouldn't work for them either. figured no reason to go through all the hassles, but I was thinking abs....

I never thought of trying to mold the whole thing in aluminum though, that sounds pretty sick... possible too I guess.... damn you ... I don't know much about doing a mold like that, I would'nt want to ruin the original piece, & I'd have to brace it to the right position cause it flexes alot, but not when installed, it almost pops into place but if it was ridgid it'd have to be just right... hmmmmm.... that would be totally sick, I could polish all of the aluminum inside the truck.... man, now you got me thinking....

I think I'm just going to go for that oem, came that way factory look, I played with some texture & I think it looks good, it looks pretty factory. this is about what the final finish will be:

wow, looks great! Glad you went with the OEM feel. Is that a spray on or a can? i really like that texture.

Nice texture!

Although I gotta say, I was hoping to see some 600C furnaces going on smelting pop-cans to cast.

Looks good!

looking great, reminds me of my treo 650 after i painted it with ceramic paint (holds up better to abuse) same texture, etc... I'll post a pic later...

I did think about aluminum casting for like a minute or 2

I want this to look like it came this way from infiniti though, so I stayed with oem finish, I guess it'll look a little more like it came from infiniti when I get rid of the acura symbol

I'll post up some details later tonight of how I got this finish

last shots for the week