For those of you that have painted your mirrors, what steps did you or the bodyshop use to achieve good results? What grit sand paper? How many prime coats? How many top coats?

 

Not sure about the specs Bob, but if you're gonna paint the mirrors, make sure they fold them in and paint the inside too. It looked really cheesy on a friend's FX4 to have everything monotone and smooth only to fold the mirror up and see the rough black unpainted plastic in there. It killed it for me.

 

Had a shop paint 2 mirrors, 4 door handles, tailgate assy and grille.
Hell I even took a set of husky liners back to have them matched too.
They did a lot of wet sanding, dry sanding preping and finally painted all parts.
No problem al all. I know adhesion promoter and flex additives were also used.
total for all about $700-725, that was carry in, I removed all parts, shop wanted addl $300 to off & on.

Look at my photos in albums

 

maybe i'm mistaken here...but i don't think you need to sand the parts...I don't think it will affect the adhesion to the plasic just as long as a proper primer like bullydog is used.

 

Interesting... Hopefully I can get a few more replies to this one. Maybe it is not worth it to get them to match. I just thought it might look nicer.

 

It'll definitely look better in my opinion... just a huge PITA unfortunately.

Another option is buying the PTM mirrors from the 2007... of course, it's just the cap on the 2007 that are painted but, it adds a nice touch with most colors -- other than black (flat black and gloss black on a mirror don't look right to me).

 

I did a how to on my Mustang to paint those mirrors. I think the same would apply to our F150's. Hope this helps you guys out!

http://mysite.verizon.net/james_petre/id16.html

 

I may look into the 07 mirrors and have the cap repainted silver to match my truck. At least its already smooth and should be much easier for a repaint then messing with the stockers I have now. Im surprised no one has posted that they have swaped or what not yet, in time Im sure.

 

Do you just buy the cap? Or do you buy an entire new mirror? Have a part number?

 

I haven't bought them...

But, looking at an 'exploded' view from FoMoCo's system -- specifically of the side view mirrors -- I'm not sure that it's an individual part... I have a sneaky suspecion that it's going to require the entire assembly.

Maybe it won't be cheaper.