Sunday, May 27, 2007  -  HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY! I spent the day in the shop today getting some more bodywork done.

Last week I decided to call up my local John Deere dealership and had them order two gallons of Blitz Black paint, which is a low-gloss (flat) implement paint that's super-tough and easy to apply. It was supposed to be in several days later, but they forgot to order it, and so it finally arrived today (Fig. 01). I was turned onto this alternative a while back while researching flat black paint jobs in THIS THREAD at HotRodders.com. It's some great reading, and includes many pictures of other's cars/trucks painted with Blitz Black, but beware!!...this thread got up to 29 pages before the moderators decided to lock the thread and condense the entire thread to a Wiki-like tutorial, located HERE.

Anyway, I've decided that after the whole truck is completely reassembled, I'm going to do some light wet-sanding  to get the finish a little smoother and hopefully remove most (if not ALL) of the vinyl-like texture, and will then hit the whole truck with several coats of the Blitz Black.

OK, back to today's progress....

Over the past few months, any time I was painting parts with POR-15 or Eastwood's Rust Encapsulator and had a little left over, I'd use it up on the bottom of the pickup box so it wouldn't be wasted, since it can't go back into the can. The bottom of the box was about 75% covered (Fig. 02), and I wanted to get it finished up today. It was tricky getting full coverage up between the box side panels, but I was able to get it done, alternating between using brushes and a small foam roller (Fig. 03). It's now ready to lay back down so I can do a couple minor repair welds before setting it back onto the frame, scuffing up the front box panel and getting it painted, and then I can get it bolted it down for the final time.

I then turned my attention to the doors and door jambs. I spent about an hour scuffing the interior sections of the doors and doorjambs with sandpaper, and then got everything coated with POR-15, followed up with several coats of Krylon Ultra-Flat paint. It didn't turn out too bad...though the vinyl-like texture did appear again, which actually was exactly what I wanted. Why, you ask? Well, even though I plan to repaint the truck, I wasn't sure if the wet-sanding I'm planning on doing in the future would actually get it smooth or just smoother....and I wanted all panels to match. So even the hood and exterior portions of the box that haven't been painted yet will still get painted just like I did before.

I also spent some time wire-brushing the interior sections of the doors and coated everything inside with POR-15...at least as much as I could reach. I was mostly concerned with the bottom six inches or so, where these door typically tend to rust out, but as long as I was in there I went ahead and painted everything I could get a brush to.

I then got started on the main dash area. I wasn't intending to use POR-15 there, I was just going to scuff it up for paint. Figs. 05 and 06 show the painted doorjambs and dash. I went ahead and used the Flat Black on the dash, although I was debating on whether to use a Semi-Gloss on that instead just for appearance sake...but in the end I decided to give the dash the same matte finish as the exterior. I also used up one can just hitting the underdash area, though I really don't know why. Since the interior firewall was going to be complete covered up with the firewall cover (or at least not visible without looking up under the dash), painting it wasn't really needed, but I did anyway.

Well, that was the extent of the day's activities. My next day in the shop will be setting the bed down onto the floor so I can do the welding repairs and I'll then be painting the box's front panel so I can get it bolted down permanently.

Once the box is bolted down, I'm not sure which route I'll take as for the project's next step. I'm kinda thinking I'd like to get started getting the windshield cut and installed, so I'm probably going to end up burning at least a full day practicing cutting glass with my new water-cooled tile saw, purchased specifically for this task. For those of you who don't recall, I bought the saw after reading about how others on the H.A.M.B messageboard have used this method for cutting windshields for choptop projects. If you're interested, read these two threads:

[ THREAD 01 ]  -  [ THREAD 02 ]

Fig. 02 - Here's the progress I'd made on the bed floor over the past few months with leftover POR-15 and Eastwood's Rust Encapsulator.

Fig. 03 - The finished bed floor. The top 1/3 is Eastwood Rust Encapsulator (which is a semi-gloss), the bottom 2/3 is gloss POR-15.

Fig. 04 - Here's a shot of the inside door areas and the doorjambs scuffed and ready to paint.

Fig. 05 - After applying the POR-15 but before the paint

Fig. 06 - And here's the finished job, after several coats of black paint. In this shot you can also see the freshly-painted dash area.

Fig. 07 - You can see how the interior is basically ready to be reassembled.