Removing scratches and repainting

[RVeraart]

Hi,

Since a couple of days I'm now a proud owner of a C5. It was tucked away in a warehouse for almost 15 years after being used by a car rental company, and almost everything that could be broken, IS broken. So far, I've fitted new tires and braking cables and have checked out the motor (works:D) and the electrical system(doesn't, yet).

My close friends all have fairly good knowledge of how to restore these kinds of vehicles, although nobody knows how to restore the original paint job. So my question for the forum is: How do I remove the scratches/filth that have gathered on my C5, and what kind of paint could I use best to restore it? i'm a real amature, and I'm not intended to making a perfect C5, just one that looks pretty good and is drivable. Thanks in advance for your reply!

[Carl Gordon]

Hi, I brought a tatty one a few years back, I gave it a good clean then painted it with a plastic paint called plasti dip! It's a white matt paint especially for plastic.its available from eBay
It's £25 for a small tin and apply it using a foam roller so you don't see brush marks.
Mine still looks like new
Hope this helps
Carl

[Karl]

There's some useful info on these links;

http://c5alive.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,507.msg3793.html#msg3793

[musntgrumble]

I tried various chemicals including bleach to clean it but nothing worked as well as the alloy wheel cleaner. As for scratches I used a stanley knife blade which in a similar method to an old fashioned cabinet scraper to "draw" across the surface this way I removed the minimum of plastic away and saved having larger areas of smoothed out surfaces which you would get with sandpaper or wire wool