I've seen different patterns & shades of silver, or argent, or silver/argent & black on these. Any survivor pics of '71 & '72 sharktooth grilles out there?
Here's a pic of the grille my Duster wore back in the day, which appears to have been argent - but its color may have been modified. It has its original '70 grille in it now.
I wonder if anyone remembers exactly what color its '71 - '72 grille actually was...?

I have an NOS one I can post pics of later. They never had a textured argent grill, but the silver color used was called "Argent" which can cause confusion. It looked much like the silver on many other Mopar grills of the era.

Did the colors differ between the '71s & '72s?
Thanks.

No, they were the same

Thanks, Scott.

SEM makes plastic and vinyl silver paint that will work well for it and is really close. Then I just used trim black for the rest.

better shot

Original paint. No black, only silver. The black is the plastic color.

It took me a day just to tape all the black off. The parking light cover above was a NOS peice.

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback & photos. It appears that the fine horizontal bars are black in the pics, though some other folks say these grilles were all silver.
Is everyone sure that Twister & 340 grilles were painted the same?
Whose silver paint is the most accurate shade to the original, and should it be flat or semi-gloss?
Did the original silver have any texture to it?
Apologies if I sound like I'm beating this to death, but I need to know the dead-correct finish.

The silver is very smooth, no texture at all. It is not gloss though. Kind of a satin finish. All 340 and Twister grills of this type were painted the same.

I would like to know what the factory jig looked like that they used to block the silver paint from getting on the black areas. If you had one of those jigs, you could paint several of these in an hour.

OK, one last annoyance...black at the "supports" for the rectangles, and between the rectangles from what you've shown me, but were the bars inside the rectangles black or silver?

Are you talking about this spot, if so they were black.

I'm referring to the small horizontal bars that are inside the rectangles in the grille itself; yours are painted black, but other guys say that they were the same silver as the rectangles & the upper & lower flat surfaces.

This might make it easier, any one point it out if i'm wrong.

Thank you! I really appreciate the detail.

I too am restoring a shark tooth, and have some questions:

First, have you ever seen a sharktooth made in green or non-black colors that was original?

The reason I ask it that my girlfriends 71 340 had an OEM grille, black plastic. The car had a boo boo, and we searched for a new grille\

Long story, but I bought a rusted out heap of a 70 just for the sharktooth grille. Looking at the back of this one, it appears to be made from dull green plastic.

I also noticed that her black plastic grille had none of the usual cracks or stress marks I see on originals, and this green one. Her car was ordered mid 70, so it was an early 71 car. It has roughly 400,xxx miles on it, with no signs of cracks or anything...other than what happened in the accident

I will try to get some pics, thanks for the good help!!!!

Heres a pic of a org grill I had

topside, the paint details Macho detailed are correct per one of my two used grilles and my one NOS one, one used is from a 72 Twister, one is from a 71 340 Duster, both appear identical at a glance. The black areas on two are natural as molded black ABS plastic, the silver is a fine metallic smooth finish with no texture and no noticable gloss "dull satin" would be a good description. However.....One of the used grilles was molded in gray ABS plastic and has the black areas painted black rather than bare plastic. I'll take some pictures of both and post them.

All of the grilles were masked with a fixture that allowed some light over spray (no sharp edges or build up on transitions between slver and black, silver fogged under/beyond the mask in many transistional areas). 71 & 72 Marker lamp wire pig tails were slightly different but interchange freely, most won't know one from the other but they are unique.

Notice how the grille above has one headlight bezel with an adjuster screw relief and one side without? I've never seen an 1970 with the relief style so I'm assuming that they started adding the feature during 71 production sometime, I've seen original 71's with one side of each, with both sides reliefed, and some with no reliefs. It was a pig in a poke as to what cars got which, probably a transition that took place due to an engineering change during 1971 production, one of the original Twisters I recently had was built in June of 1971 and had one of each.