The diffuser above the windshield wipers looks absolutely terrible. It's difficult to photograph, but it appears someone tried to clean it with some sort of cleaner that was not compatible with the very cheap plastic. It left awful discoloration. So I decided to pull the piece off and spray paint it.
The piece is attached with 10mm nuts recessed in between two pieces of hood metal, so if you drop a nut it's probably gone forever. I dropped a socket into the "engine bay" area and had to open up the undertray with a string of profanity to retrieve it. There are also some pressure-fit clips that you have to pop loose, while wondering if this cheesy plastic is going to shatter in your hands.
Anyway, this piece turned out to be two parts, and when I pulled them off it looked like this underneath.
Tells me that air flows back underneath the diffuser and into the depression in the hood, at least a little bit---and that likely in carwashes some water makes its way in there too. Might be a good thing to fill in the back side of with some expanding foam if I feel sufficiently motivated sometime.
Today I did not.
The previous owner also left behind some leaves for me.
Ironic because this is a NISSAN LEAF. Get it? Sorry.
Reinforces my belief (be-LEAF) that air can and
does go back up under the piece.
I did take the opportunity to clean it up, however.
After that it was off to the back yard for some high-tech pigment application.
And reinstalled on the car. Looks SO much better, holy hell. There is a dent in the plastic where someone dropped something, or a rock hit it or whatnot. I tried to heat it a bit with a lighter and bend it, but I feared I'd end up cracking it or deforming it worse, so I ended up giving up and leaving it.
A quick thing to fix and certainly not an aeromod, so I won't link it in the first post, but it still felt great to get done. Gotta say, the whole time I was working, this little punk was mocking me.
