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Love my 2006 c4 but the owner before me sure scratched up the center console. Small thing but annoying to look at. Any suggestions for a fix? New one ? or I've read some guys paint em?! Thanks in advance gents.
Simple solution is to respray it with the matched paint provided by Scratch Wizard or other suppliers. I have resprayed some interior parts as a stopgap measure and they look fine. Ultimately I replaced most soft touch painted surfaces with carbon fiber, including the center console.
I've been touching up my interior plastic piecemeal with a little jar of paint I had made at Home Depot where they scanned my ashtray cover for a match. Cost me something like $5 I think. Blends in invisibly.
When the console gets bad enough (I'm pretty cautious, so far it hasn't deteriorated much from when I got the car) I will remove it (or have it removed), strip it, and repaint it to match. (I like keeping things stock). I see no point in just respraying it...too much fussing trying to mask everything against overspray...and unless the old, degrading paint is completely removed, whatever goes on top of it won't hold up well.
The deluxe solution from the posts I've seen is to use the repaint service at bumper plugs.com. Our consoles are shown at this link here.
On my current 997.2 the dealer had someone do a fairly decent refinish so I've left it alone. On my prior 997.1 the ashtray coating was pretty scuffed up. I got it looking pretty much perfect by removing the rest of the coating. You couldn't really tell the difference in the coated console and non-coated ashtray unless you looked closely with a flashlight, and even then the ashtray was the better looking of the two.
I did this by removing the ashtray lid, soaking it in hot water, and then rubbing with my thumbs vigorously (repeat several times since it keeps cooling). The coating came out without a lot of difficulty. Here is an "after" photo I took at the time. You can see all of the coating in the sink. I guess you could do the whole console too, but I wasn't brave enough to try.
or order new leather bits from Suncoast - that's my next major mod as mine is starting to look sort of beat - not that bad, but I never liked it anyway - will probably bite off the big job of doing the door handle inserts as well - ugh! worse thing about the 997s - that crummy interior coating.
I bought a OEM painted center console to replace mine when I couldn't take the scratches anymore. A good deal for a painted one popped up online and I pulled the trigger.
Lots of options it seems. Thanks for all opinions and guidance. I'm leaning towards a stock replacement since I'm a stock kinda guy. But we shall see. Cheers.
One thought about stock... Since the CPO'ed stock cars I've had were all experiencing some degradation of the console surface after 4 years, I can only expect that a stock replacement would do the same.
10-05-2015, 08:04 PM
Center console
