Vinyl roofs the easy way

There is a multitude of ways to simulate the vinyl texture commonly found on late 60's and early 70's muscle cars. There's spraying a textured medium like Mr. Surfacer or atextured paint. There is also the technique where you spray paint from a great distance letting it build in to a sort of grainy look, however there's an extremely simple technique and all you need is a roll of wide masking tape, some cotton swabs, a few round toothpicks, and a hobby knife.

Here we have a 1970 Dodge Coronet that I had originally installed a white top on. After years of storage in a smokers house it had become damaged and yellowed so I decided to replace it.

The first step is to pull off a section of wide masking tape and lay it on your roof pretty much centered. Use your cotton swabs to burnish it down and toothpicks to work it around the trim. When it's nice and snug, use your hobby knife to trim away the excess around the windows.

Now find the exact center line of your roof. The Coronet has a center ridge in the trunk which made this step easy using a length of striping tape laid down the center of the body shell. Using a pen mark the center line then measure an equal distance on either side and mark some lines. In this case it was 1/2" on either side of the center line.

With another piece of tape repeat step one for the sides of the roof. The edge of the tape on the roof should line up exactly with the off center lines you drew in step three. On this particular roof the tape fit perfectly around the curves, however this is not always the case. You may need to trim the corners a little and do a tuck to get it to settle down.

Repeat the previous step for the other side of the roof. Instead of messing with styrene strips to create the parallel seams on full scale vinyl roofs you notice the tape overlaps have created them and saved us a step.

Now you can paint the roof. Vinyl roofs commonly came in white or black, however some MoPar vehicles were known for some crazy 'mod top" designs in the 60's. Check your references. No need to mask and spray either unless you really want to. I just used Model Master flat black acrylic paint and a wide brush.

After the roof paint dries you can trim the roof with silver paint or Bare Metal Foil. The entire application minus paint drying time only took around 15 minutes.