Painting the trim around the grill

Bought a good single grill plus chrome strips that go around the outer edge for 30 pounds, but I noticed that chrome and Lhasa don't go together! So how do you go about painting the chrome strip? will the paint stick to chrome?Also Mars red looks like orange, are you all using a different colour?

Lahsa - I'd ebay that grille and get a red one to repaint.

If you clean up the chrome and run some wet and dry over it the paint will stick.

There was a BIG discussion on the old forum about correct colours for the grille trim and I'm not sure if we came to an agreement.

Anyway I use Mars Red No2 over red primer.

Think the darker of the mars reds is the correct one? I actually used Fiat ops: blood red from Halfords as it looked the part.

Cheers

Yeah - No2 is the darker one.  But it is thought that the earlier cars had Mars red No1 grilles - hence the loooooong discussion before.

was told its mars red

VW did two shades of Mars Red, No1 and No2 - No2 being slightly darker

Strictly speaking there are 5 production shades of Mars Red for the VW range, but only 2 paint codes (L31B and A3A). A3A had 4 different releases according to the factory.

L31B was first released in 1975. A3A was first released in 1979, but not for the Golf built in Wolfsburg which was released in 1982.

Cheers
Rajan

Cheers,

Its a shame to paint a mint set of chrome, but Mars red 2 here we come!

Interesting info about the different shades of red. I take it the Mars red 2 GTI is more sought after than Mars red 1?

I've never heard one being more sought that the other. I doubt most people even know the difference!

Cheers
Rajan

Went to the paint factor and they looked up mars red (marsrot) and found there are 3 shades in the early years and 1 in the later years. I couldn't really spot the difference. I went for the later marsrot.

Job now done and the red trim has transformed the looks.

cheers