Awhile ago I decided I was sick of the wood trim in my car (it was the putrid matte finish junk that would look cheap in an 80s Buick), so I removed all of it and painted it silver (as in my sig below). Lately I've been looking at the silver around the HVAC controls and head unit and thinking it looked a little cheap. The beltline trim in the car on the dash and doors, in silver, I really like, but the silver panel in the center of the dash was looking a little chintzy.

I decided a splash of piano black would be a nice touch to set it off. Started it last week, but I pulled it out today, did another coat of black, then wet-sanded and did a few coats of clear over it. The final result is below. Please excuse the crappy pics - I don't have my digicam on me so I'm using my cell phone. Thanks for the high-res pic quality, Motorola. Anyhow, here's how it came out:

Before wet-sanding the final coat:


In the car:


You can see that the paint is more reflective than the climate control screens here:



Another one showing some shine:



I think I'm going to keep the silver trim in the rest of the car just to keep the inside defined a little better. I toyed briefly with the idea of doing the same treatment to all the trim, but it'd be too monotone for my tastes. Gonna leave it this way. For the amount of time invested (a few hours or so, most of which was waiting for various coats to cure), I'm very happy with the results. If you look down below in my sig, you can see how it looked in silver. Not bad, but this is an improvement for sure.

 

that looks awasome i like it better than the silver for sure
props for bein brave enough to rip all that again a second time

 

Thanks man, it looks great in person. Hopefully I can dig up my camera's batteries and get some better pics. Nice thing about doing only that piece is that all I had to do was slide my headunit forward, pull off the DIN trim ring around it, and remove two 8mm bolts, and it came right off. The piano black is an awesome look - if I had the two-toned gray/black doors that a lot of cars with gray/tan leather have, I'd do it for all the wood trim for sure. But since I have a solid black interior, I'm keeping the silver to set it all off a little.