71 Duster sharktooth grille?

-
7

71blueduster

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jan 25, 2005
Messages
244
Reaction score
0
Location
Hastings, Nebraska
I got a sharktooth grille to replace the standard grille in my Duster and have a couple quick questions. What is the proper color for a 71 Duster sharktooth grille and where can I buy the paint? On my standard grille, I used Mopar argent silver wheel paint. The grille has a couple of small cracks. What is the best way to repair these?
 
My grille was NOS when it went on the car. the center section is black. I've seen cars with argent colored centers too, some might have come that way too. I don't have any better pictures than my avatar, they got lost switching computers.
 
these are of a nice grill... The horizontal bars are black, the vertical loops are silver, as is the main body

0ad8_0.JPG


0c25_0.JPG
 
This is all I have at the moment, I'll take better pics of the grill itself, and post them later this afternoon. This was NOS 8 years ago, never been tempered with or touched-up. The headlight bezels were re-painted with the wheel paint (Argent-Silver), not a perfect match, but very close, you wouldn't notice it if I didn't point it out.

This one for now,http://s203.photobucket.com/albums/aa59/340butterduster/?action=view&current=P4100016.jpg.

More coming...
Later,

Giles
 
Here's a few more pics, I took this afternoon. Although the main body is silver on mine (back is silver). It' s the body of the grill that is black, and the silver was painted. I hope you can see from these pics (the factory wasn't perfect), the overspray and so on.

Hope this helps,

Giles
 
Thanks for the pics. I'll probably paint the middle black, then mask off the fins and paint the silver. It will be a lot of work, but I think it would look better that way then all black or all silver. The grille right now is all black.

So is the Mopar argent silver wheel paint close enough or is there a better source of silver paint that will match the factory color. I don't need a perfect factory matching grille, but I'd like to get the colors close.
 
The wheel paint (Mopar) is not as brillant, as you can tell from the last pic.

I believe there is other options now, there wasn't at the time I did mine.

I think there's a paint for the grills (barracuda silver), you can likely get from "Year One", not sure, I'd have to look it up.

Giles
 
I'd have to say no, it's not factory. The signal lights are, but the rest was painted to match the headlight bezels, looks like '70 340 Duster bezels from that pic.

And the easiest way is to mask off the tabs, don't do them individually, it'll take forever, the factory simply masked off in sections, hence the overspray.

Giles
 
=P~=P~=P~=P~Mmmmm sharktooth..... 71 blueduster, been following your car for a couple of years now on cardomain. Lookin' good! Good luck with that sharktooth, its going to really set the car off!!:cheers:
 
Bigmacdak said:
=P~=P~=P~=P~Mmmmm sharktooth..... 71 blueduster, been following your car for a couple of years now on cardomain. Lookin' good! Good luck with that sharktooth, its going to really set the car off!!:cheers:
Click to expand...

Thanks. I've wanted to put a sharktooth grille on it for a long time, but the prices were always way more than I wanted to pay or the grilles were total junk. Finally got lucky and got this one for a really good price after getting outbid on a couple others on ebay that weren't quite as nice and went for quite a bit more money.
 
It took me forever to tape mine off. I had to tape every little fin off, not fun. In the end it was well worth it.

DSC06016[1].JPG
 
That's what I did to my original grill, yes it was very time consuming and somewhat frustrating, it also came out looking great.

It looked better than the NOS one I have on the car now as far as details are concerned. But it had broken tabs and small chips in the fins, and both trim pieces (top and bottom) had stone chips in them, it looked like they were sandblasted.
 
Use PVC cleaner and PVC cement from Lowes or Home Depot to glue any of the cracked and broken parts. You can even use scraps of PVC plastic to rebuild missing pieces!
Yes, the pictures ButterDuster has posted are the correct way to paint the grill. I agree also that it is a tedious process to mask off the horzontal black parts but the end result will be awsome! I have an unrestored grill myself and am going very carefully step by step to make sure I do it right. I've seen some at car shows that are either sprayed completely silver or have a half assed job over all. Yuck! Here are some pictures of my unrestored grill and you can see how the factory wasn't very careful with over spray.
I think I'll go with the paint from Totally Auto Inc. as well.
Good luck everyone!
P.S. The duster is finally in the shop to get its tranny swapped to make it a manual shift car again! Yey!

100_1244.jpg


100_1245.jpg


100_1241.jpg


100_1238.jpg


100_1237.jpg


100_1266.jpg
 
im restoring mine would it be a good idea to use a plastic primer b/c i test sprayed a little area on mine n the argent paint started to wrinkle n fish eye
 
ryan426 said:
im restoring mine would it be a good idea to use a plastic primer b/c i test sprayed a little area on mine n the argent paint started to wrinkle n fish eye
Click to expand...

On the one I repainted, I didn't use primer. Although if it would've been available at the time I would've used it.

Giles.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
-

Back
Top