Originally Posted by fork

First I would like to say that this was an excellent DIY write up. I followed it almost to a T.

I had enough foresight before I began this endeavor to buy a set of handles for me to work on as time permitted so that I could leave the handles on the car. That paid off big time for me as what I had hoped would be a straight forward operation took twice as long and cost twice as much as I was expecting.

The disassembly of the extra set of handles was straight forward. The only problem I ran into was that only one of the screws had a liberal amount of thread lock on it and the knurled nut insert ended up splitting the the plastic of the handle before the screw came loose. It was an easy repair for that and I disassembled the handles the same way as the OP. I also used 4-40 screws to replace the rivets on both handles.

I ordered the non-metal spray paint kit from PaintScratch in my car's body color (Deep Blue Pearl). The website even gives the option to put in your car's VIN which would give the correct paint formula for the paint (they say). I sanded the handles, cleaned them, used the supplied degreaser, applied the adhesion promoter and put primer on all as instructed. I put down four coats of the base color and had very good coverage on the handles. But the color just didn't seem to match the car. The spray color was almost like a crayola crayon kind of blue. It was a blue blue that didn't have much of the metallic fleck effect that the paint on the car has. I am a paint newbie and thought the clear would give it deepen the color and give it that sparkle. So I went to spray the clear. The spray kit from PaintScratch comes with a spray gun that you can attach to the top of the spray cans. I had successfully attached the gun to the primer can and the base color can. When I went to attach the spray gun to the clear can and I ended up slipping off of the top of the can and I busted the spray can stem off. I busted it down in the can and there was no way to have to the clear flow from the can. After MFing the can, I ordered the 2K clear that OP used off of Amazon.

After letting the base coated handles sit for a couple days, I took the handles out to the car again and finally convinced myself that the color on the handles and the color on the car were definitely not the same and were definitely not going to be the same no matter what I put on top. I didn't want to take any more chances and just took the handles to a body shop and had them sprayed with the right color for $150.

The most difficult part of reassembling the handle assemblies is getting the main spring installed correctly while also sliding the hinge through the handle components and the spring. If you use a little grease on the hinge and take your time, your fingers might not hurt TOO much when you are done.

Removing the handles from the car was pretty easy. I used OPs trick with the painters tape to keep the bolts from falling into the door. (Genius!) I didn't feel like monkeying around with disconnecting the smart key button connections inside the door which made removing and installing the handles a little bit more "tight" but still pretty easy. The hardest part of installing the new handles was reattaching the lock/unlock lever to the locking mechanism. Smaller hands would definitely ease the frustration. I did end up destroying the plastic around one of the knurled nuts when I was taking off the original set of handles from the car for the same reason that happened on the extra set of handles (too much thread lock on the screw).

Even though I had to wait a week longer than I wanted for the finished product and had to pay twice to get them finished, I think the handles ended up looking very nice!