Author: bill

It was a pretty quiet weekend here, but I’m still trying to get warm-weather things done before the cold weather hits. I did some work on the door cards I got up in Massachussetts to get them ready for paint. They were covered in about three inches of grease and dirt, so I played a hunch and used Easy-Off oven cleaner to clean them off. When I had all the crud removed I could see where the rust lived. Originally I was going to sandblast them but I figured that would take forever, so I just used the wire wheel to remove all of the bad stuff. Meanwhile I covered the back sides with Rust Converter to keep them clean.

Friday afternoon I went to the local Sherwin Williams Automotive and had them match and mix a quart of base color from the beat-up original door panel on the truck. I had them match from the area behind the door escutcheon, which hadn’t been dulled by UV rays over 60 years. After some back and forth I used some of their paint matching chips to get as close as possible in the sunlight out in front of the store. The best price I could get was on a quart of base coat in satin, which is going to need a final clearcoat at some point in the future. But the difference being roughly $200, I was happy to go with the more inexpensive option.

On Sunday morning, I cleaned everything off with acetone and got my table ready to shoot everything. All four panels needed two light coats for good coverage—the base was a lot thinner than the other paint I’ve been shooting.

Then I shot the heater box and heater cover. Everything flashed very quickly and within two hours was more than dry to the touch.

I hung all four-door cards on the truck to keep them out of the way and make sure they didn’t get scratched up in the garage.

Meanwhile, I was working on new mounts for the west coast mirrors. What I decided was to mount these using existing holes in the doors. There were, over time, about four different mirror installations on the truck, one of them being perfect for the mirrors I have. I bought four regular steel bolts and pushed them through the back sides of the doors to weld in place. Then I ground the backsides down as much as possible to give clearance for the weatherstripping and doors.

The passenger side still needed to be worked on: all the old holes had to be ground out and welded over like I did on the driver’s side. Then I cleaned those up, feathered some filler over them, and sanded it smooth. As of Sunday evening, both mirrors are hung on each door with a quick coat of basic rattle can red over everything.

The Sherwin Williams guy told me about some inexpensive clear coat I could get on Amazon much cheaper than in his store, so I’ve got that in my cart for next weekend. It’s a satin finish so it won’t be as dull as the original cards, but if it protects everything I’m not going to complain. And when the heater box is finished, I can reinstall that and get more of the stuff under the dash completed, which is one of the fall projects on my list.

Here’s the video update from the last two weeks, which contains all the sanding and painting I’ve done on the roof.

I think the roof project on the Travelall is done. I scuffed and wet-sanded the first coat of paint on Sunday with 1500 grit paper, which basically knocked the shine down. From there I hit it with a tack cloth and prepped the tent for shooting paint. Because I was so wiped out from a trip to my FiL’s place on Saturday I didn’t really have the energy to do much more—I did re-splice the second wire off the large bulkhead connector to restore my marker lights but not the flashers, and I spent some time sanding and fixing the shitty peeling clearcoat and scratches on the drivers rear quarter panel. Those got a coat of rattle can international red which should keep them covered and protected for the time being.

Monday morning I put the tarps up around the ghetto tent, taped and papered off the entire truck, and got everything ready to shoot the second coat of white paint. I used more of it on the first coat that I had for the second, so I had to be careful in my application. I was able to cover the entire roof starting from the middle section out and I think I got good coverage. I probably could have dialed the gun in a little bit better – if I had a little more paint, I would have dialed it thicker. I think the air/paint mixture was a little too dry, and so it went on with a little more texture than it should have. But the whole thing is covered and I’m happy to have that part of the project behind me. I’m going to see how it weathers over the winter, and if it’s really sloppy and looks bad, I’ll wet sand the whole thing again, buy another can of the paint, and spray a solid second coat over it.

While that was drying, I turned my attention to the Scout. I drove it out of the garage over a tarp and pulled the fill plug out of the transmission. Nothing came out, so I drained the entire case. Then I dug out my fill pump and my last two cans of 50W racing oil. After pumping both of those into the case, it’s pretty clear there wasn’t 3 1/2 quarts still in it—I’m actually quite certain of that. Nobody had 50 weight racing oil around here locally so I ordered some from Amazon, which should be here on Wednesday. The next thing I’ve gotta find is a new PCV valve to replace the one on the truck. If that’s clogged, the pressure inside the crankcase was too high, and it may have blown the seal out of the back end of the transmission. But, I’m going to fill the case and drive it a bit to see if it’s still leaking very badly.

What you’re seeing there is a coat of Bright White 2-stage auto enamel on the roof of the Travelall about an hour after shooting it last night. Overall it went on very smoothly—I dialed in the gun pretty quickly and had it laying down a clean pattern, but I didn’t use the drywall stilts to move around. They proved to be cheap junk, so they are going back for a refund. I think the paint went on pretty evenly but most likely I’m going to wet-sand the whole thing and shoot the second half of the can on the center section just to be as thorough as possible.

Today (Wednesday) I have the guy from the glass installer coming back to re-install the driver’s side window with a new gasket, so after I’d shot the roof I had Jen help me take out the glass, which went quickly now that we’ve done it four times. The steel around the window edge is in absolutely fantastic shape—I only had to sand rust out of two dime-sized spots. Seriously, it looks like it just rolled out of the factory. I used a nylon sander to remove all the adhesive on the inside edges, washed all of the dirt off the outside edge, and sprayed a coat of IH rattle-can red around the bottom lip. Keep your fingers crossed for a successful installation today. It’s supposed to be 95˚ so hopefully the heat will be on our side.

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.