General Grabber Red letter Restoration

So I have owned my General Grabbers for about 2 years and I have put 22k miles on them. Recently I noticed the Red on the sidewall fading and cracking. I searched everywhere but couldn't find anyone who had tried to restore theirs. I tried calling General for advice but they just wanted to buy my tires back for pennies then sell me new ones. I declined. So here is my ongoing attempt to restore my tires to their original color.

This is what they currently look like. White and cracked.

I started out using a red paint pen to color in the letters



It works ok but is very tedious and will require multiple coats

Here is a whole side finished




I thought about plastidipping it so I tried that out



This is three coats of the plastidip.


It looks the best but it is so hard to get the lines perfect especially where the letters curved and I didn't cover it enough and had alot of overspray. Whoops.

That's where I am at now. I will post more pictures and stay updated.
If you have any advice or experience please let me know!

 

The good thing about plasti-dip though is that the overspray rubs right off after it dries, I just use my thumb and rub it off...got my fair share of overspray too on my paint when I was plasti-dipping the chrome on my bumpers.

 

Yeah I was hoping it wouldn't stick too bad, but you're right. If I rub it it rolls off fairly easily.

 

Another thing with plasti-dip overspray too is that you have to be careful taking off the masking tape after you spray it on, if it dries and you remove the tape you might accidentally take off all the work you did. I learned this the hard way after 3 hours of hard work masking off my entire front end to do all the chrome...went to peel the tape off and half the chrome came back

It's best to remove the tape a minute or two after spraying, when it's still wet.

 

Awesome. Thanks for the advice!

 

Red Sharpie work?

 

I haven't tried that but I don't think the sharpie would be able to fill in the black gaps left by the paint cracking.