Car Bra

[Rolls]

Hey all,

Partner recently got a stone chip on the side fender of her car as there are so many damn trucks in Sydney.
As a result I am now looking at car bras for a 6R GTI.

Has anyone got one and/or can recommend a decent one?

Also - once you have it on, am I right to say you need to remove it in order to open the bonnet?
and if so - how hard is it to put on/remove.

Does it cause any heating issues?

Never had one before so currently looking into this.

Lastly - her headlights also got scratched from rocks - any fixes?

I've had a look at the original car bra and they have quoted $407 for standard black or 473 in any colour

Thanks heaps
Roland

[MackTheKnife]

If you think the stone chips damage paint, wait till you see how much mess car bras do to paint. Good luck with that!!

[Hillbilly]

Get some 3M film put on it Will stop chips from most small stones and cost about the same

Look here www.ozishield.com.au

[Rolls]

If you think the stone chips damage paint, wait till you see how much mess car bras do to paint. Good luck with that!!

Hi Mack,

What do you mean by mess - what exactly happens?

[The_Hawk]

What does it do? It rubs where it touches, some more than others which when left on can leave worse marks than stone chips. (especially if it's left on full time). Lots of people have them and only use them for long country trips and not every day.



The clear shields are pretty good and stop lots of chips, just make sure you replace it when it starts to look rubbish/faded/hazy because they do wear out. The other thing I hate about this stuff is they tend to to a strip across the bonnet, if I were doing mine I'd want the whole panel/bonnet done so there are no obvious marks / lines across the car, but then that's me.

Plan B is to price what it will cost to have a panel shop re-paint / touch up the front of your car every few years and compare that to the cost of the vinyl.

[gavs]

A car bra will capture all the dirt and debris that runs off the bonnet underneath it, much like a car cover. When the car bra flaps in the wind etc, the dirt particles will scratch the absolute crap out of the paintwork, I have seen one that came off a BMX X5 recently that wore the paint back to bare metal, the owner bought it 3-4 years ago when we had a massive locust plague down here and just never removed it. The only way i know of to fix the damage caused by car bras is a respray, I have tried to do paint correction on 2 cars that had them but to no avail, I just wasn't happy to remove the amount of material required to remove all the scratches.



Car bra = very, very bad idea.

[JonP01]

Hey all,

Partner recently got a stone chip on the side fender of her car as there are so many damn trucks in Sydney.
As a result I am now looking at car bras for a 6R GTI.
Lastly - her headlights also got scratched from rocks - any fixes?

Honestly, I agree with Gavs - a car bra is far more trouble than it is worth. Apart from ruining the paint in the long run, you will soon get very sick and tired of putting it on and taking it off all the time. And if you look at some of those Youtube videos of "experts" putting them on and off, it doesn't look that easy or quick to me - and I can see they are damaging the paintwork every time they put them on, let alone all the dirt getting under them as Gavs says. Another point is that they will likely effect both aerodynamics and airflow - not a good thing with twin turbos and a supercharger under the bonnet. I wouldn't be keen on the extra weight either - however slight it is still going to add weight to the front of the car. They are incredibly ugly too in my opinion.

Best choice is to simply live with the chips - buy the specific OEM two-part touch up paint from your local VW dealer and just fill them in as you find them. I'm incredibly careful and leave huge gaps - especially on freeways - between myself and cars ahead of me and do everything I possibly can within reason to avoid stones, but I have still gotten a number of chips in the first 3 months of ownership - one stone did triple damage - it clipped the front of the bonnet - bounced onto the windscreen and took a chunk out of that, then hit the front edge of the roof and took another large chunk out of that for good measure - and when that happened the nearest car to me was about 300 metres ahead on the freeway.

You just have to learn to live with them, or buy another brand new GTI, wrap it in bubble wrap and never drive it for the next 40 years...

As for the headlights, depending on how deep the damage is, it may possibly polish out using a plastic polish such as Mothers brand. A more labour-intensive way is to use a Micromesh kit that has various grades of abrasives - these are used on aircraft windows, for example, that are made of perspex. It can take a long time to do the repair and after that you will still need to polish, but they can make damaged plastics look virtually brand new again.

Micro-Mesh KR-70 Acrylic / Plastic Restoral Kit | The Sandpaper Man

[gavs]

GTI has single turbo mate but I see your point....

[amazeer]

I'd rather have a few ugly stone chips than a bigass mutha fekkin ugly bra.

Sooner or later the missus is going to find my key and steal/stack it anyway. I'll get a respray then