[Richard]

I figure I have dragged the old Subie about 100K miles behind our coaches. The front bumper was showing the effects, plus the usual dings and impacts a 14 year old car will have. 

I have been thinking for couple of years about how to spiff that up a bit without going into the prep work needed to make new paint look decent. New glossy paint over beat up surfaces will look worse than doing nothing. So I got this idea of using bed liner tinted the original color of the bumper. That redneck instinct kicked in and this week I painted the bumpers and rocker panels with tinted bed liner. 

I did some experiments first using the Shuchtz gun that is normally used, but that gave a heavy texture. Plus the recommendations of the stuff I used, Dominator, had you spraying from 2 ft away. That gave a grainy feel to the finish, perhaps good for keeping your firewood from sliding around, but I was afraid you could never get the bugs off that finish. 

I finally settled on using an HVLP gun with a 2.0 mm nozzle normally used to spray heavy primer. I cut the glop about 20% just to get it to flow and wet out a little better. Holding the gun about 8 inches from the surface and spraying a good wet coat gave me a moderate texture and sheen.