I took the week before Finn went back to school off and visited my family in New York. Returning home to get her ready for school, I spent a good part of Friday finishing the wiring work in the truck.
Saturday’s progress wound up being two steps forward and one step back. Actually, on Friday, I had most of the day to fool around with the dashboard and finishing up the electrical work, so I put the big rubber grommet on the bulkhead connector and tried to get it through the bulkhead. I want having to take the entire hood off so that I could sit on the air cleaner and work a screwdriver around the edges of the grommet along with a whole lot of dish soap in order to get it through the metal. Then hooked all of the connections back up and noticed that there were some really crappy spices on a couple of the wires so I broke out the electrical gear and cleaned those up with proper splices and heatshrink tube. Unfortunately, when I tested the electrical, I found that my turn signals are not functioning anymore.
I fooled around with the wiring for another half an hour to try to get the signals to light back up, but decided to pivot to the roof in order to get it ready for paint. Last year I spent a lot of time sanding out all of the rust spots and dents, filling them with body filler, and sanding everything smooth. It had a coat of rattle-can primer over top of everything but as we all know primer collects water and I wasn’t able to get it painted before things got cold. So the whole thing sat under a car cover all winter and spring. Looking at it this summer, I noticed that some of the filler was bubbling and there were some rust areas coming through, so I got out the grinder and cleaned out all of those areas and refilled them.
While those areas were drying, I cleaned up the sections of sheet metal under the drip reel, and around the back doors. I had to make the ghetto tent even more ghetto by lifting it off the ground with cinderblocks, in order to be able to work on the edges of the roof. A couple of inexpensive Harbor Freight LED lights hung from the center post made things easier to see. I also figured it would be very difficult to drag something around to stand on the entire time I was painting, but I was annoyed to find you can’t rent drywall stilts anywhere around me. So I ordered a set of cheap stilts from Amazon. That way I can raise myself up 24 to 36 inches and simply walk around the truck while I’m spraying it. Unfortunately they didn’t come the day they were promised, and showed up on the porch three hours after I had sprayed the top with fancy enamel-based primer.
The painting process went both better and worse than I was expecting. With the white paint I bought for the roof I got a midrange HPLV gun for solvent-based paint. I’ve had a bunch of experience with an HPLV gun shooting latex paint on the house, so I knew most of the ins and outs of how to get the gun working the way I wanted. Mixing the paint was a new challenge though, and dealing with oil-based materials made cleanup a bit trickier, but the paint went on pretty smoothly and now I have an idea of how much to mix for the entire roof of the truck.
It’s supposed to be sunny for the next two days and then damp and rainy for a stretch after that, so I’m going to try to sand it down this evening and prep it for shooting white paint on Wednesday evening if I can really hustle. Having the roof painted will free up a lot of other things, and I won’t have to worry about keeping things covered so much anymore.