ckhorne's 1967 project

[Esteban]

Excellent!

Certainly your updates have been missed! Your work with the paint will be interesting to follow, so please keep the pictures coming.

And talking about pictures, in the one showing part of the front-left without the fender, we can see a nice adaptation of a power booster. Please post some additional details and parts used.

[ckhorne]

I parked the frame/tub to the side and started working on the other panels/doors/hood, but finally wised up to trying to find something other than DA sanding for stripping paint to bare metal. I settled on strip disc's - more expensive but far, far faster in stripping paint. In retrospect, I should have just taken everything to the sandblasters.... oh well... lesson learned.

The tub, still connected to the frame, was easy to roll around and paint. The other panels needed to be painted on all sides, so I had to figure out a way to do it in my driveway... and so my ghetto paint stand was created.

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Note the much heavier pitting and spots of rust - especially on the tops of the front quarter panels, which had sagged over time, and presumably water pooled up there. So... I fixed this by welding in a piece of channel steel under both sides after they were painted:

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[ckhorne]

And talking about pictures, in the one showing part of the front-left without the fender, we can see a nice adaptation of a power booster. Please post some additional details and parts used.

Oh - I was the original poster in the Brake Booster thread - it was just moved out into its own thread for better visibility!

So after all the panels had a coat of epoxy primer on them (Southern Polyurethanes is very specific that the paint goes on bare metal, and then filler), I started body work. Now.... I realize that a purist will use a dolly and hammer and spend days/weeks/months smoothing out the metal until it's perfect. However, I'm a realist, and I was ok with bondo repairs, and so just limited myself to 1/16" of bondo or less. I ended up using Rage Extreme - about 2 gallons of it, and I probably sanded off 1.9g of that...

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What I didn't realize until later (until after all the filler was done) was that there's a reason I was recommended the high build primer when I bought my paint... I sanded the bondo until it was almost glass smooth, not realizing that the primer is designed for the last few microns of smoothing things out. Good news is that I saved myself about 3/4gallon of primer. Bad news is that I spent months doing fine block sanding that I didn't need to.... another lesson learned...

Anyway, after all the filler was done, I sprayed on another coat of epoxy primer to seal the exposed metal, and then a couple coats of primer:

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[ckhorne]

At this point, I realize that my "good enough" paint job has become more exacting than originally I set out for it, and that I was more impressed with my first paint job than I had expected of myself. Not perfect, but better than my low expectations.

Anyway, at some point I had to figure out what I was going to do with my hard top and rear doors. The hard top was in terrible shape - it was rusty, had holes, and was more bondo than metal in many places. And the rear doors were almost beyond repair - the bottom of both doors were completely rusted out from water collecting there, and one had tons of bondo filling the holes from the PO:

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So... I explored options, and found that rrodriguezsal here on the boards offered a soft top frame, soft top production, and rear doors, all for a very reasonable price shipped from Bogota. I always liked the idea of a soft top anyway, so I ordered everything. It was a pleasure working with Raul, and I'd recommend his work to anyone on here.

[ckhorne]

I assembled and test fit the rear canopy on mid-progress:

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And the canopy at one point:

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Excellent fit and finish. Rear doors were a perfect replacement too (just set in place... no hinges here):

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[ckhorne]

After everything was primed and sanded to 220 grit, I sealed it with reduced black epoxy one last time.

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I went round and round about how to best paint the hinges and bolts. I'd get the best results if I painted them in place, on the body, but I'd break the paint if I ever had to remove anything. In the end, I painted everything separate. This later meant that all the screws that needed to be body color would also be painted separately.... what a pain...

[ckhorne]

For the sake of anyone reading this in the future, I want to talk tools for a minute. This whole project was sponsored by Harbor Freight it seems. Not because I wanted to cheap out necessarily, but because I couldn't justify buying $400 HVLP guns and the like for a one-off project. My HVLP guns, blast cabinet, straight line sander, and even air dryer are all Harbor Freight specials.

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Unlike my son and sanding, I couldn't pull my daughter away from the blast cabinet...

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My welder and other long term pieces of equipment are higher quality. Sandpaper is another place that I realized quickly that it wasn't worth buying the cheap stuff.

Painting your own vehicle is doable at home, with modest equipment. It's terribly time consuming and still requires a lot of random pieces of equipment, but doable. If you enjoy doing something yourself, go for it. If you're looking to save money, reconsider....

[RiverPatrol]

Great progress! Thanks for the update.

[ckhorne]

When I started stripping everything, I had intended on leaving the interior until after everything else was done, just to limit the project scope. But after a bit of painting, I realized that it'd be a lot easier overall to just bite the bullet and do the interior at the same time.

I had never intended to paint the inside of the rear tub. I just don't like painted metal interiors - they look nice... when never touched. The problem is that if you use your truck for any kind of utility, it's going to get scratched. I took my 3-day old Tundra (with < 15 miles on it) to get the bed Line-X'd, with zero regrets. So... the inside of my Patrol will be Line-x'd. If I'm kicked off the forums after saying that, you guys know why...

However, I did want my dash and front door interiors to match the body color, so I started stripping things down one night:

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A lot of stripping, spot sanding, and more practice on welding patches in body panels later:

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Painting with a HVLP gun inside those foot wells was tricky, at best. Hard to keep a consistent distance and speed inside a cramped space, but everything came out surprisingly good.

[ckhorne]

And then comes up to my first big mistake. I had waffled on the paint color for a while, and I had pretty much settled on a blue - likely a darker blue from the period. But when I got my canvas in, it just had too much of a hint of green to get away from anything other than white, black, tan, or green. The first two were out, and between the last two, I went with a green.

I wanted to avoid PPG just because of the cost, so I called up Southern Polyurethanes for a reference. They sent me to a shop they work with who could mix up Motobase base paint. Cost was around $400 for a gallon of base and a gallon of reducer.

The day came to paint my base coat + clear coat. I was a slave to the weather and timing, so I had to pick a day that would hit around 80 degrees and 50-70% humidity. I setup a ghetto paint booth with a couple of 10x10 canopies, a bunch of plastic, and a box fan and HVAC filters:

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Hey - don't laugh. It worked.

I moved the panels all inside and painted:

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