Satoshi Thin Lip Weekend Project

Spent the last few days converting my stock 07 Tacoma grille to a thin-lip satoshi grille. I ordered the grille mesh off of Custom Car Grilles and after 3 weeks of waiting (due to a damaged package mess up on Fed-Ex's end) I got my mesh and went to work. I had ordered an OEM Toyota emblem off of ebay a while back for $25 and wanted to seperate the letters from the black plastic strip that goes through the center of the letters. So while I was in-and-out chopping up my grille I also chopped up and re-finished the edges of the letters.

Some things I would do differently next time:
- Be extremely careful cutting the grille, my hand slipped on a number of occasions and sliced the silver paint part of the grille. After this happened 6 times I had to sand the entire grille down and repaint the entire thing with a paint-matched paint. Huge waste of time
- Do not use Automotive-Goop as suggested. Takes way too long to dry in thick globs and the sides of the mesh will bounce back out from the pressure it puts on the goop. I used a generic 2 part plastic-welding-goo I got at Canadian Tire which dried extremely solid in 30 miutes. Worked much better
- Buy a cheap belt sander. Hand sanding those letters took way too long
- Be patient and wait till its not freezing outside before painting. The paint will look shit and youll have to sand it off and re-do it.

Here are a few pictures from the build

 

Updated pics. Its been about a month now and the plastic-weld/adhesive is holding up great. I polished the clear coat and waxed the grille and the paint job looks good too considering it was all done with rattle cans

 

Nice. What did you use to adhere the mesh to the shell?

 

Mostly Black Automotive-Goop, which worked fine but I ended up having to go back and use some J-B Kwik Weld Plastic Bonder Epoxy on some of the edges like the lower sides of the mesh because the tension the mesh was putting on the goop was enough to stretch the auto-goop outwards and not make it sit flush on the shell. The Auto-goop is good but it has a decent amount of stretch even when fully cured which sucks for this mesh which is strong and not very bendable. The Kwik Weld epoxy dries rock solid and doesnt allow the mesh to flex at all which is what I needed

 

Nice info I used gorilla 5 minute epoxy which worked good just have to let it set for 24 hours I figured out yesterday building mine