Jeff,
Did you hit on a P.I.T.A. question. Please excuse my while I vent for a second...
Ok and thank you, I feel better now.
You are dead on with an original 71 R/T grille. They were molded black and not painted. It wasn't gloss black or flat black, but somewhere in betweeen. The pictures in the link below was the second 71 Challenger grille that I restored. The first one was by request, then the second by referal. I thought after the first that I hoped to never see one again. The biggest problem for me was not being able to find or even think of what tooling would be required to install the new rivets for the center argent moldings. Because of that I had to tape the living daylights out of it to paint the light argent silver.
I welded the cracks together and used a doner grille to fill in the missing pieces on both of them.
To answer your question, I hit this grille with gloss black gloss laquer about eight or nine times working my way sanding from 400 working my way up to 1000 between coats, then polishing finally with a soft cloth to finally get an acceptable look.
BTW, then there are the headlight bezels and hood trim, another
, but they must be done, too. You have to tape off those lines using the aluminum and not paint silver to get those two horizontal extension lines from the grille to extend between the two headlight openings.
Jeff, you gave me a headache!
Here is a link, that for some unknown reason, I still get a kick out of seeing one when completed:
http://www.cuda-challenger.com/cc/index.php?topic=43627.30Slotts
