02/10/2026
You may have heard us mention Plastidip before in group posts and comments, so we thought we would put together a short list of it's benefits, with the help of our formerly bright yellow ambulance, we painted in 2018 .
It is very easy to apply and requires minimal preparation, a simple fence type electric sprayer will suffice and a clean surface.
The ambulance was bright yellow and apart from filling up some of the dinks from a million car doors on the aluminium side and washing it, no other preparation was performed.
I have marked the picture with Letters to outline some key benefits for this particular application :-
A - you can paint on plastic direct, no plastic primers. Plastic flexes and warps over time and this paint beign flexible just follows it.
B - You can paint directly over original painted metal too.
C- Rubber, yes rubber strips such as this can also be painted direct, not many paints can bond to rubber, let alone cope with the flex.
D - Fibreglass, the entire bottom strip and rear pillars are fibreglass, not only can you paint them direct, the coating provides stone impact protection etc..
E - no need to mask sharp edges such as this alloy door frame. once dry just peel it off the frame, and the door handles and hinges (as you can see we didn't do that entirely ).
The lettered picture is after 6 years+ of pretty hard use as a work van , there are about 3-4 coats of paint and a couple of coats of their glossifier. The gloss finish did not come out that well, as when it was painted it was extremely hot and it was done outside, so the paint dried partly before it hit the surface, leaving a rough finish.
The bonnet, which was painted indoors at around 2 deg C, somewhat earlier came out shiny :)
As you can see it was a very lazy paint job, no masking apart from the orange/blue bits. It is worth noting that masking is somewhat different with plastidip due to its elastic nature, and it is better to not bother if possible and peel off the excess later. a stanley knife, pizza cutter and metal ruler can help here too.
And.. if you get bored of it, you can peel it off. if it becomes damaged you can just touch it up, new plastidip dissolves into old.
P.S. this is not a sponsored post !
