Faded emblems

[Nordical25]

Emblems are small but important part of the car. Unfortunately Tercel emblems have usually faded colors. Therefore, restoring them can give new appearance to whole car. Here is my restoration example of some emblems that I found lately from an auction.

I did find emblems that belong to 1985 AV-II Carib. Most of black paint and red paint had disappeared but chrome surfaces were in good condition.

First stage is to inspect surface of emblems and to see, what parts of emblem are in good condition and which parts do need restoring. Usually you don't want to restore a perfect and intact surface. Especially chrome surfaces are challenging to remake. Therefore I allow small surface issues on them. And they can even be polished to get them shining if they are intact enough.

Usually chrome surfaces withstand time better than painted surfaces. Paint fades away easily in hard sunlight, especially red color.

[Nordical25]

In second part you want to consider what kind of appearance you want to make when refreshing emblems. There are two ways: custom and original look.

In custom way to try to think, how I can remake emblems so that they are more cool than original ones. There are several techniques for this. Some like carbon fiber surfaces for example.

So far I have everytime restored emblems back original look. In this case old brochures are nice to have. From them you can see usually correct appearance of emblem but not always. Therefore an additional Google search of correct vehicles help to verify correct look.

I did find from both Internet and from old brochures that "4wd" text is in red, "Sprinter Carib" & "AV-II" are in chrome and remaining parts are black.

[Nordical25]

After figuring condition and preferred state of emblems it is time to start improving them.

In this case chrome surfaces were very intact so I scraped most of that remaining black paint away to get steady surface for primer. Usually you want to avoid having uneven surface when painting because you can see it even better after a repaint. Therefore old paint must be removed carefully. I got most of that black paint scraped of and protected all areas that were not painted black.

I cleaned the surface with brake cleaner from dirt before painting. I did paint first with primer, then with black color and finally with matt lacquer so the surface does not shine too much.

Then I did everything to red letter areas similarly and finally I inspected the result.

The result was not perfect so they needed small improvements. Sometimes masking can fail and some paint can get to unwanted areas. In this case you can remove most of current spray paints with for example turpentine.

Some areas can lack still paint. In this case you can mask everything else except that area to get an even result.

In the end work pays of. The end result is not perfect but still better than it was in the beginning.

[NWMO]

Very nice Nordical!

[dlb]

Wow those turned out amazing!

[Nordical25]

Thank you very much both NWMO and dlb!

You can also use pretty much same procedure for side mouldings, front grille and rear moulding around emblems. Here is my example for the licence plate moulding sold to me by MrWrench a couple of months ago. I attached pictures before repaint and after repaint. And I display final result with a random expired California plate that I bought for decoration some years ago before trying to obtain actual Finnish short plates for my car.

The rear moulding had some minor cracks but I repaired them with scale model glue and sand paper before sanding, primer etc. So minor cracks in emblems can still be repaired too with correct tools before repaint.