Red paint peeling

Airportable wrote:

I have, in the past, been critical of the purveyors of duff information & to find I’m involved in the same caper is a right bugger.
It’s to be hoped that no one has shot out to the car & made a shit show on the back of my poor memory.
M

 

If you had a left bugger you would have the set!

As my father always said “The man who never made a mistake never made anything “

I paint my mirrors and door handles recentley in flame red as they were badly faded.  The door mirrors are attached with a couple of screws and are easy to remove, you also need to remove the doorcard and disconnect the heated mirror plug.  The doorhandles a a bit fiddly and I found an excellent post with pictures in the how to guides on this forum to be able to remove them.  I used masking tape in the mirrors rather than taking them apart and then rubbed down the red with 400 grit sandpaper and then 800 grit wet and dry, three coats of plastic primer, then red and then laquer and they came out great.

Thank you Rob, that was several orders of magnitude more useful than my “contribution”.
M

Though I'd share my views on this topic as I haven't posted on here for a fair while. Earlier this summer I took my TF off on a little road trip to Lake Garda in Italy . Whilst passing through the numerous Toll  booths I unfortunately got far too close to one and scraped a huge amount of paint off the passenger side mirror back, on a rusty bracket that was protruding out from said booth and had no purpose whatsoever in being there other than to mark sticky outie bits of a car! On return to the UK I set about removing the entire mirror head to see if I could manage a decent rattle can spray job. 
The result of my attempt was excellent even though I say so myself. At this point if I were to give advice on this topic I would say my only concern was to obtain a good match to the Firefrost red of my TF. I took the mirror head to a local paint supplier Carlac ( other specialist companies are available) who are good at this sort of job. My only other concern was having to leave the mirror head with them for a couple of days for them to match the paint, as there is always a chance that it could have been lost. I bought three large rattle cans of primer, colour and lacquer , plus some 1200 and 1500 grit wet and dry. Another tip would be to get plenty of all three coatings on and let them fully dry overnight whilst also flatting down between coats.  The finish I achieved was so good it put the other mirror back to shame but I'll be leaving that job for overwinter when the car is sorned. 
John  

It sounds like you literally managed to get a mirror finish there John

I have to say that it surprised me how good a finish I managed to achieve.

Thanks everybody - for some reason I didn't get notified about any replies, so thought nobody was talking to me

Hhmmm maybe I'll lash out on a bodyshop job... once I see the magic phrase "remove the door cards", I know it's beyond my increasingly shaky fingers/blurry eyes/short temper!

These are mine after painting 

Those are rather impressive, great job.
M

Snap! , did mine last weekend

 

Door handle replacement is very common and well documented. I have done it a few times and it is not too hard:

MGF & MG TF Owners Forum - Door Handle - How to remove/replace. - (the-t-bar.com)

Be sure to inspect the condition of the 'pins' on the back of the door handle that the bolts mount to. Due to lateral stresses (and weak design) these plastic pins crack and break over time. If yours are cracked - either repair with some kind of epoxy (there are posts on this as well) or replace the entire door handle with a new part from xpart (since you are repainting anyways...). It would be very frustrating to repaint the door handle and then have it break a short while after.  

Of course, if you are not comfortable with this, just give the car to a bodyshop. They probably have techniques of repainting the parts in situ.