New front grille - anybody found a good one?

[Cohibastevie]

Hi folks, been a long time since I posted, glad to see the forum is still going strong as ever.

So my front grille on my 2008 mk5 GTI looks as grey as my granny’s pubes.

I’m looking to buy a new one but the aftermarket ones on eBay seem to be very glossy whereas I’m looking for the OEM satin finish. Anybody found one that has good fitment with the chrome ‘GTI’ badge included as well as the main VW emblem.

Bonus the same can be found for the lower grill and fog light surrounds.

I’m contemplating calling VW for an OEM one but I hear they are charging extortionate prices and they are also having trouble sourcing them.

Any help is appreciated - thanks in advance you beautiful humans

[ZoliWorks]

Your best bet is to either get one from a scrapyard or get the cheap one and repaint it. I can say for sure the ebay ones dont compare to the factory quality. Factory ones were super expensive so when I was doing the GTI face swap on my previous car, I ended up just buying a cheap ebay copy and spray painting it myself.

You could also just get yours painted, especially if it's OEM. Might be the best bang for your buck solution.

If it's the honeycomb part that worries you, you could try using a heat gun to blow hot air on it and revitalize the plastic. I used that to restore the front and rear bumper splitters on my old car. Tho make sure it actually works since it depends a lot on the material. some plastics will fade and if you try and restore them this way, they'll just burn up (VW badge on the trunk for example).

[pudding]

No is the short answer.  I ended up going for a genuine one and painting it in 2K satin black to stop it going grey.  The copy ones I tried were complete garbage.

[TheBALDpuma]

I very recently bought from here https://www.undergroundparts.co.uk/collections/golf-mk5-parts

I bought the upper and lower grill, the standard GTi grill with red strip. It's a really great replacement, mine was smashed from hitting a pheasant. Although it looks like they have no stock of them at the minute. It isn't gloss like some are.

It doesn't have the badges mind, I refitted mine from my old grill. I would recommend destroying the old grill to carefully remove the GTI badge rather than try to tease it out, I broke 2 out of 3 of the fixings! Mine is stuck in with araldite now which seems to have done the job!

[Cohibastevie]

Thanks for the replies folks.

Looks like the paint option is the way to go. Def not ideal but that’s the way the cookie crumbles I guess.

[Lewo]

Got my smooth grill from Underground too. Not many parts on there now for some reason...?

[pudding]

Thanks for the replies folks.

Looks like the paint option is the way to go. Def not ideal but that’s the way the cookie crumbles I guess.

It's what I would do personally, if you can't find decent aftermarket one.  Just make sure you prep it well and use a black primer, and plastic adhesion promoter first    That way stone chips will be less noticeable.  I also popped the pin stripe out and repainted that n Tornado red.

The thing with the aftermarket ones I tried, I could just immediately feel the plastic quallty was sub par compared to OE......but for 50 quid or what ever they cost, I wasn't too surprised