The little things

A friend of mine once told me that it’s always the little details that make a car stand out. I try not to think of any aspect of cleaning and repairing a car as being too small to pay attention to. The interior construction on GM’s B-Body cars from the 90’s really is poor. The plastic pieces wear and crack something terrible. I’m not entirely sure just how it happens but even the dash emblems wear off after a while. The logo on the passenger side of my dash was looking pretty bare and it’s one of the many little things that I know I’ll feel better about after getting it fixed.

After some digging around online for the best method of repairing silver plastic trim in cars I came up empty. Once I stopped looking for it, I discovered some guys chatting about the very same thing over at stationwagonforums.com. Lo and behold, it seems that several folks had run into the same issue that I had and solved it cheaply and easily. The answer was…a silver Sharpie marker. The silver coloured markers work very well for re-doing the silver plastic parts on the interior of cars. The marker isn’t a replacement for chrome but for something as simple as the Roadmaster badge on my dash it worked perfectly. It seemed pretty silly but I was really quite surprised at how well it worked. Sharpie’s are permanent markers so it should last a while, and if it doesn’t it takes nothing to simply repeat the process. You can see below that the difference is quite dramatic.