Venture Shield on my headlights.

[Peter B]

Well it was warm this weekend... kinda anyway, my car was reading 46 in the sun.

So after gettin my oil change/15k tune up (ok ok 13k check up....my baby already hit 13 k ) I decided it was a good saturday to do a little work on my car.

A while back i purchased a Ventureshield clear bra kit for my headlights and rear bumber from nextlevelride.com. I dont want to pay $600+ for somone else to install one for me, as im pretty sure I can do it on my own. I decided to start with the headlight/ rear bumper kits because they are the easiest pieces to install, and cheap too. If I screw up no big deal.

I started using maguiers (sp?) plastX plastic polish. Designed for clear headlights, won't cause cloudiness, scratching or ghosting. My left headlight has a small gash from a rock in it, and both lights had a few little pin marks here and there as well as water stains. The stuff worked well leaving the lights looking nice and clean. I wasn't too anal about getting all the marks out, I wanted to finish the job in a timely fasion.

Next I used a little goo gone to remove any tar/grease etc that might be on the lights. I then washed that off with an auto glass cleaner. I pulled the car into the garrage and turned on my two small space heaters, and let the car run with the highbeams on for about 10 mins, so the glass would be warm.

The installation was pretty straight forward and easy to be honest. Came out looking pretty good. Hardest part was gettin the edges to stay down. The job isn't perfect but from 3 ft away you cant tell. The only mistake I made was to cut one of the pieces of venture shield as apposed to stretching it on one of the edges. Oops, as soon as i did i realized what a horrible Idea that was. It left a slight overlap which looks alot like a crack in the glass. When I order the part for the hood, I will probably order one more headlight cover and redo that one.

Other then that it all turned otu well. Now my headlights and fogs are protected! I opted to do them first since its easier to repair small nicks in the paint as apposed to small nicks in the headlight glass.

I will post pictures later tonight when I gethome.

 

[J-Villa]

(guitar)

 

[Peter B]

OK here are the pictures... I took a few minutes to snap them when I got to work this morning. I was already an hour late, a figured another 2 minutes wouldn't matter.

Keep in mind these have been on since Saturday, so there is alot of salt and crap from the road on them.

Left headlight

There is one bubble visable in that shot. After reading about how to do the install a couple of people have said to give it some time and some of the bubbles will go away. The ones that don't you release witha syringe

Foglights were easy, just clean, spray with solution, squeegie and done, no stretching around curves.

The Right headlight came out a bit better, except for the place where I thought it was a good idea to cut the material. Clearly that was the worste idea of the day.

What do you guys think?

 

[GoFast]

awesome thing to do if you ask me. I am kicking myself in the ass for not doing mine because one on my foglight lenses cracked from a rock or something. Had I done this, I would have a not cracked foglight. SO two thumbs up from me

 

[Peter B]

Really everyone should do this, it was easy, took like an hour. Less than $50.00 I think including plastic polish, glass cleaner and googone.

 

[antlind]

You've got to be careful with the material you put over your fog lights lens.
The lens on the fog lights tend to get very very hot and can melt the plastic coating. I had this happen with the material I got from Rockblocker a while back.
Anthony

 

[Peter B]

Yaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy more venture shield.

So I applied more of the venture shield to my car this past weekend. I don't like the way the gas cap just falls against the side of the car. One of my favorite gas stations is full service with cheap gas. The guy always just pulls the cap out and drops it against the side of the car. My instinct is to get out and give em a good verbal thrashing, but that seems like a somewhat douchey thing to do when hes standing in the freezing cold pumpking my gas. (come july im gonna let em have it though! )

Anyhow i bought some extra film to protect the paint under where the gas cap rests. Here is how I did it.

First I unrolled the material and placed it over the fuel door so it covered the area I wanted to protect. I traced the pattern out following the curves and pannels of the car around where the gas cap hangs.

The first thing I noticed when I cut it out was it was backwards. Since I had to trace my pattern on the paper side, not the film side I should have inverted it.

Application was super easy, no curves or contours to stretch the film around. I kept the fuel door open and laid the material across where the door would be. Once I had firmly attached it i took a razor and gently ran it along the the lip of the fuel cavity (is that what you would call it?) to remove the excess and get a cut line that followed the the edge of the fuel door perfectly. Had to be careful not to cut into the clear coat. The same techique was used over the line where the rear fender comes up and meats the pannel around the fuel door.

The same

All in all it came out pretty well. The only thing I was not happy with was how noticable the line at the edge of the material is. I didn't think i would be that ovious. Makes me wonder if I really want to put this all over the front of my car. Plus you can see my cut was not as smooth as I had hoped it to be in on spot. I need to get a better tool for cutting the material. Fortuneately I have enough extra material to make another 2 attempts at this. This will hold me over until I get a little more practice.

One other thing I noticed is that the venture shield seems to be much thicker and less stretchy then they show in the videos. In the videos when they install it that material looks almost like the plastic wrap people use to wrap their lunch. This stuff seems to be much more vinyl like. Anyone else have any experience with it?

My next project will be the rear bumber. I was going to do that too but I noticed a few small scratches in my bumber. I think I would like to try to get them out before I but the clear bra on it. Anyone know any good scratch repair products?

-Pete

 

[Zimmer]

nice job... I really regret doing this my car has pitted to hell i hate it

 

[Peter B]

Zimmer
When the good weather comes, Im gonna do the front of my car. I have the pitting too but I have some touch up paint and a clay bar. I was gonna go crazy and detail the whole front end and get er back to lookin new-ish, then put on a clear bra.
Perhaps we should combine our powers and do two cars at the same time?

 

[Zimmer]

Great Idea lets plan on it! A nice warm day too!