NatB

My 2002 Z06 has nice body colored mud flaps on all four wheel wells.

I'd like to remove them, but it will leave 2 screw holes at each inner fender lip.

They would need to be patched/filled and touched up to match my paint. I have the touch up paint.

Is this something I can do at home and have it look right? How?

Thanks

DansYellow66

You won't really know what condition the paint is in until you remove them for a look. The space between mud flaps and fenders is a common trap for sand that abrades the paint. If the paint still looks pretty respectable, the easiest approach might be to get some relatively small-head screws and using touch up paint, paint them to match and install them to fill the holes.

Otherwise, you will need to use a proper repair material and sand it smooth which will mean carefully respraying the areas of fender lips at least. Depending on the color and if your have a little skill, you could probably get by with buying a pint of color and pint of clear from a PPG dealer and picking up a Preval compressed air touch up unit which is cheap. The holes need to be filled with something catalyzed and primed with something catalized which may require another pint of primer. You would need to carefully back-mask the outer edge of the fender lip and surrounding area to avoid a hard tape line. Do all the prep work - degrease, sand the lip until all gloss is gone, degrease, tack the surface, mask off and spray light coats of prime, base, and clear. Over-reduce the last coat of clear and carefully spray it to help blend in the overspray at the edge. Then a couple days later, polish the lip to hide the blend area. As long as the paint edge is on the radius of the corner of the lip you should be able to hide the repair pretty well.

If you carefully fill the holes and smooth the surface with minor disruption to the surrounding paint (popcycle sticks and carefull sanding) you might get away with careful masking and spraying light coats of Duplicolor spray touch up paint (the color match is going to depend a lot on the color). Back-tape the fender lip and take a piece of light cardboard and cut a round hole in it slightly larger than the repaired area of the patched hole and holding it about 1/2 inch above the lip, use it as a template to spray through. Let it set a week and then polish the lip and see what it looks like. Urethane CC is very hard to touch up by spotting in.

ragtopman

If your wanting to do what I think you want to do without sinking a ton of money into it, get some 3M 08115 bonding glue and fill each hole applying it with a razor blade or plastic spreader, fill hole so as the glue is level with the wheel lip, let dry, cut a sharp angel on a match stick and touch up.

NatB

Thanks my friends for the responses!!

The car is garaged most of the time so I hope the paint is in good condition. However er, I will take one of the flaps off to look.

If it's too much of a pain, I may as well leave them on as they look good.