Mesh Grille Insert

    This is one of those projects that comes from being really bored when the weather is crappy and feeling the need to work on the car.  So even though it's cold and raining outside, my garage is nice and toasty.  I first got this idea from seeing Civics with these horrendously ugly body kits with a huge air dam of a bumper.  These people feel like it's a good idea to cover every single opening, large or small, with this metal mesh you can buy at a hardware store.  I've seen this mesh used on wood walkways to make them not slippery so using it on a car is the next logical step.

Let's Get Started

    Here's a nice refresher before shot.  The grille I have is the honeycomb style grille that I had bought online.  The mesh probably wouldn't work with the horizontal bar style grille but if someone figures something out let me know.

No that's not rain, it's tears of joy because I get to work on my car:

       The first step was to figure out what tools I might need.  I chose some wire cutters, a utility blade and some needle nose pliers.  I also had a pair of tin snips handy incase I needed to call in the big guns.

Some tools:

    Next I removed the grille by pressing the four quick release snaps.  I then used the wire cutters to cut the honeycomb all around the perimeter where it was connected to the grille.  This worked out pretty well except the wire cutters weren't cutting to close so I had to use the utility blade to finish off what was left.  As a finishing touch, some sandpaper was used to smooth everything out.

The grille sans honeycomb:

    I had bought a small piece of metal mesh a little larger than the grille so I could trim it to the right size.  This stuff is relatively cheap if you know where to look.  The hardware store only charged me $2, but the import tuner shop wanted $10 for the exact same thing.  I've seen some car accessory catalogs that sell different styles of mesh and you can even get it  in different colors if you want.  So there's options out there.

    I thought I might have a hard time figuring out how to attach the mesh to the grille but it wasn't to bad.  On the upper part of the grille I was able to use the metal openings that the quick release snaps clip into.  I just unscrewed them, slipped the mesh underneath and screwed it back on.  

This can be seen here:

    To attach the mesh to the lower section of the grille, all I had to do was take the needle nose pliers in bend part of the mesh edges behind the little vertical braces that are located on the back side of the grille.  

Check it out:

    The mesh is on there really well.  I sure if you pushed hard enough on the front you could pop off where it's connect on the bottom.  But otherwise it's on there good enough for me.  I didn't want it attached permanently because I want to eventually repaint the grille.

Here's what both sides look like:

All Done

    When I was all done and had the grille back on the car I was actually impressed how good it looks.  The color of the stainless steel definitely compliments the red paint.