Saturday, October 4. 2008
Note: a full project description with lots of pictures is available here
You might recall in our last installment there were big plans to paint the mini-truck. That finally came to fruition and like most of John’s projects, took twice as long (about four weeks instead of two), and cost about twice as much as planned. John also discovered his body actually is way behind his brain – the mind still believes the body can do anything it could accomplish 20 years ago. The reality usually occurred about three o’clock every afternoon when he started dragging, and every night when his sore hand woke him up due to pain. Of course the old adage “no pain, no gain” applied here and John just took pain pills and kept on truckin’. It literally felt really good to complete the job, not only from being proud of the accomplishment, but the pains stopped for the most part.
There is a lot of work involved with a paint job on a vehicle, even a small one like the mini-truck. Removing parts (figuring out how to remove the parts takes more time than actually removing them), sandblasting rusty areas, spraying primer, wet-sanding the body, spraying primer, sanding, repeat three times. John literally sanded his fingerprints down to smooth before he started to wear latex gloves to protect his hands! After a couple of weeks of prep work with primer and sanding, the truck was finally ready for its color coats.
We need a little digression here. John’s first choices for the truck color were olive drab (going for the military look), or camouflage (going for the hunter look.) Jane wanted almost any color except John’s first two choices so a good compromise was quickly reached – Hunter Green. Hunter Green was chosen because that was the green color that Lowe’s carried in Rust-oleum paint. Yes – Rust-oleum paint! John read a story on the Internet about a fellow that painted his Corvair with Rust-oleum and it turned out nicely, and the price was right (about $25 a gallon.) Automotive paints can be very expensive and they generally consist of base color coat, and then a clear coat to protect and enhance the color coat. Rust-oleum was simply easier to deal with not to mention the low cost was an incentive. Spraying the first coat of green on was quite exciting as this was tangible evidence the project was moving along and the end was almost in sight. Some of the truck received two coats of green (with wet-sanding between all coats), and some received up to four coats where he was having a coverage problem or made a mistake. Fortunately not too many problems happened with the final green coats as John was getting the process down better and better.
After the green was finished and the truck dried for a couple of days, it was time to put it back together. This went extremely well since John took the time to group, bag and label all small parts, and marked larger ones with tape and marker.
Finally it was time to roll on the bed liner, a do-it-yourself kit by Herculiner. This was fairly simple and it was fun turning the last part of the primed truck into a finished product. The bed coating will be very practical (totally seals the metal and prevents scratching the paint) and it looks really good.
Since John has lots of primer and green paint left over, he is now thinking about painting the trailers. He figures each trailer will take only four or five days…