Jack Olsen

I'm a new owner of a gently-used 2015 C300 4Matic with the Sport Interior/Exterior. I've never owned a Mercedes Benz before, but one day into it I'm really liking the car.



But there's one thing I'm not crazy about. The splitter on the front end of the sport models is more conspicuous than the standard one, and it's chromed -- which to my eye gives a viewer two things to look at on the front of the car. The grill up above and that splitter down below. I learned that on the 'Night Edition' cars, they blacked the splitter out. And when I saw that in a picture I decided I would try to do something similar -- to maybe wrap the lower piece in vinyl. But rather then jump in with both feet and take the front bumper apart, I decided to simply put some vinyl on the thing while it sat on the car. I wanted to get a sense of what it would look like.

So I took a break today and did this:

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I like it. But I'd be interested to hear others' opinions. I would guess the original designers of the thing would give me a thumbs down. Although they did come up with something similar for the Night Edition.

What do you think?

Tomsti

I'm in with you, like what you did.

Mr_marko77

Drew White

How difficult was it to do with the lip still on the car? Did you do it all in one piece or three? Looks great!

Jack Olsen

Thanks. It wasn't especially difficult -- but that's partly because I was holding myself to the standard of 'this is just an experiment to see what it looks like.' I used self-adhesive vinyl -- off-the-shelf contact paper -- which is also what I use to make the decals for my race car. Applying the stuff is pretty straightforward; you just want to avoid getting bubbles trapped underneath it. I think there's a way to do it where you wet the surface and then use a vinyl smoother to push the air bubbles away. But I worked with six different pieces and just peeled the back off, stuck it down on one end, and then smoothed it in the other direction. It wasn't hard, but then I've done it a lot, over time. So for others, it might make sense to practice a little. Of course, you can practice right on the piece. The stuff leaves no residue and can be peeled off pretty easily.

The contours of the splitter are complicated, so it was outside of my skill set to do it with a single piece of vinyl. If it were removed from the car, that might not be the case. So up close, you can see the lines from the vinyl edges on mine. But you've got to be down on your hands and knees to see that. And even the original chrome piece has some clunky joining points where the three pieces are fit together in the first place.

I like that it's matte black. I think an attempt at matching the gloss finish would look a little awkward.

Here's another picture.

A2thek

MBSebas87

+1

Jack Olsen

It's not just you, A2thek. Here's the odd thing: the thing that first drew me to this model of Mercedes was the chrome sport splitter. I remember thinking that it was kind of wild for a Mercedes, in a good way.

But then when I really started looking at the car, in black particularly, I kind of soured on the look of the same thing I'd initially liked. So, I'll cop to being a little bit odd on this issue.

That said, for me, I like the change I made.

Mikey53