Custom One of a Kind Themed Doors Sills...Like No Other!

I'd always wanted some custom door sill plates for my Challenger, but never could find any that I liked. My solution was to design and create doors sills that would fit the theme that I use for my car and most importantly, be uniquely mine and one of a kind. Thus came along the creation of my Lil' Twister Door Sill Skins project.

Since I'm a storm and severe weather freak, I decided to dress up my car with a subtle severe weather related theme. I had previously setup the Twister lettering and animated cartoon character for the sides of the hood scoop risers and the back of the trunk lid. There is also a logo on the steering wheel horn pad. My main desire in all of this was to have everything subtle and tasteful so that it looked lilke it all could have come from the factory as an appearance package option.



I have been into computer graphics since I took classes in college back in the late 90's, so this part of it allowed me to do things first hand and made it really easy as far as creating something I liked goes. The software I used was CorelDraw for the vector artwork and Corel Photopaint which was used for bitmap work. These two programs output work similar to what Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator can. You can layer things, fade things and combine different elements in your designs seamlessly.

The basic design consists of a honeycomb pattern that is generally related to the newer mo del Challengers built since 2015. In fact, the top surface on my console and my dash insert both feature a gray-ish silver honeycomb pattern due to their being part of the "Plus" package option that my car was ordered with.

After the honeycomb background was created in CorelDraw, I then pulled in some artwork elements from a previous project I had created featuring my Challenger's front end peering out of a bank of tornadic clounds with lightning bolts running down over the bumper. The final touch was to import the "Twister" lettering just below the Challenger discharging lighting bolts out of the grille and then add the lighting bolts flowing over the countryside on each side. It's a rather haunting visual with those "evil eyes" glowing and in combo with the lighting bolts scattering around!



Now that the hard part was finished, I took the art file down to my friend who runs a local wrap shop and he pulled it into his plotter software (a plotter is basically a very fancy printer for vinyl wrap and decals) and proceeded to print and diecut the two sill wraps for me. The resulting door sill decals were very glossy and lustrous at this point, but I wanted more - a protective layer on top to protect it from shoe rubs and so forth. He then cut some paint protection film in the plotter that would fit precisely over each piece of door sill wrap and act as a self healing shell over it. I was very happy with the results of his work and took everything home for installation. I first did a dry fit and made mark-offs where I wanted to position and adhere the sill wraps on each side of the car and I then cleaned off the sill areas with isopropyl alcohol to ensure good adhesion. After about 30 minutes I really had myself something to admire - I was pumped, that's for sure! Even though most would never see them unless I opened the doors and showed them off, it just felt good to add another touch that nobody can buy off the shelf or online. Love making my car, MY CAR.

Here are some photos of the finished product...



The photo's below show my car at the Big M Mopar Show at Heller Dodge in Pontiac, IL last year for it's first outing with the sill wraps...