Hi all,

With the help of many people here, I painted my 1993 Toyota MR2 in October 2020. I was very happy with how it came out, and it has held up great since then.

Until this summer. The pics below show what I have going on. This is on the thermoplastic front bumper cover:




I don't know if this was from bad prep or surface contamination, or lack of a flex agent (I was told I didn't need one), or incompatibility between the Eastwood epoxy primer and the Evercoat poly primer, or something else. But my question is about how to approach a fix.

This is a tri-coat pearl. White base, pearl midcoat, clearcoat. I have all those materials left over and stored properly. I sprayed a small test panel and everything seems to still be good.

Should I

A) Sand the damaged area back to factory primer, then blend in new primer/tri coat?
B) Sand the entire bumper cover, blend in the damaged area, and clear the entire cover?
C) Sand the entire bumper cover and repaint the entire thing?
D) Something else?

Thanks for any advice!

You have an adhesion issue.

Try to determine which layer is still firmly attached to the bumper. It is the layer after that which failed to adhere either due to poor prep or incompatibility.

This is just speculation but i think the Evercoat is your problem. i've seen a lot of failures with this material. did it by any chance get bumped? after a year or so the Evercoat gets very brittle, especially if applied fairly heavy. which it looks like it might be. please let us know what you find.
Jay D.

badsix wrote:This is just speculation but i think the Evercoat is your problem. i've seen a lot of failures with this material. did it by any chance get bumped? after a year or so the Evercoat gets very brittle, especially if applied fairly heavy. which it looks like it might be. please let us know what you find.
Jay D.

I have used Evercoat Featherfill G2 on a few projects. Never had any issues with it.

sure i have to. but most of it gets sanded off leaving it in the low spots. its when someone trys to use it as a filler insted of a leveler and applies it to heavy that its a problem. i used it on some bed sides and it worked very good but like i said i sanded most of it off, but it did flatten the sides i shot a wet coat of hi-build over it after sanding it and looked perfect. i'm still with the idea that it got bumped at sometime and cracked the Evercoat then the paint started to fail at the broken edge.
Jay D.

The question is,
Did you paint over bare plastic?
If so, did you use a adhesion promoter before the primer?

badsix wrote:This is just speculation but i think the Evercoat is your problem. i've seen a lot of failures with this material. did it by any chance get bumped? after a year or so the Evercoat gets very brittle, especially if applied fairly heavy. which it looks like it might be. please let us know what you find.
Jay D.

It didn't exactly get bumped - it got hit just in front of this area by a lacrosse ball going about 90 mph! It actually almost took my head off. I had just parked at a sports facility, and a lacrosse team was practicing and a ball came flying into the parking lot. So I'm pretty sure that whatever happened here was started by that impact.

JCCLARK wrote:The question is,
Did you paint over bare plastic?
If so, did you use a adhesion promoter before the primer?

I didn't paint over bare plastic. I sanded through levels of rattle can and then OEM paint to OEM primer, then shot it in Epoxy primer (the Eastwood). I had been warned about the anti-mold agent used in the plastic causing adhesion issues, so did my best not to sand through to it. On close inspection, it looks to me like the epoxy is still well adhered, and it's the tricoat on top of it that has begun to seperate.

Regarding amount of poly primer, I did probably leave a lot on there. The bumper cover was very wavy and had lots of distortion.

Does anyone have an opinion about how I should fix this? I've never blended a panel before, and as the tricoat includes an interference pearl, I'm thinking I'll just sand the entire bumper all the way back to OEM primer and start over. I'll use less poly primer and do more blocking so there's not a heavy buildup.