My F150 project (Page 4 of 5)

Today, however, was a different story. Somehow we got the crazy idea to build a booth so I could do some in-situ sandblasting of the cab without having to relocate the frame. So, off to Lowe's for some 1x3 and 4 mil plastic, and then to Tractor Supply for sand. Sadly they were out of the 60/80 grit I have been using to date, so I had to buy the much, much more aggressive (and yet somehow less effective) 20/40 grit. Oh, and I decided that a $20 siphon-feed gun was a good investment, since we have to blast the whole cab, the doors, the fenders, the core support, and the bed.
Once I arrived I got my stuff unloaded, plus the 4 quarts of Amsoil 75W90 I had in the garage here at the house for the rear.
We got the blasting booth together quickly, and while I started blasting, Mike filled up the rear.

Quickly I realized that the screen in my blasting hood alone wasn't going to cut it (this extra-coarse sand somehow gets through the fine stainless steel mesh much, much easier than the finer sand) so I had to put the lexan shield back in. Naturally, Mike had to take a picture of me.

We also had a good idea to mitigate the high compressor head temperatures we had experienced before during prolonged uses, so Mike rigged that up as well:

It worked like a charm. Instead of peak temps of >330*F before (granted, ambient was in the low 70s last time,) we never measured >250 with the fan (and an ambient near 40.) I'm gonna have to find a smaller fan and a better mounting system to make it permanent.

So anyway, while I worked on blasting, Mike started working the hood with phosphoric acid...

...and a Scotch-brite pad.

It came out pretty good. As best as we can figure, the few black spots are bits of rust that got converted by the acid before they could get knocked down by the pad. I think the final 320-grit sand before the epoxy primer goes on will flatten them out nicely, either way.

And then there's the cab. I found two more spots that need to be patched - one small spot in the floorpan, and the other being basically the whole piece the sill plate screws into. That one is gonna be fun, because it's got a perpendicular piece on it for the door seal to sit on.

The coarse sand really blows the paint off, and leaves the primer pockmarked pretty well. You can kinda see the finish here on the firewall:

Sure beats the hell out of sandpaper.
I got most of the door frame taken care of tonight, and exposed a spot (near the top center on the seam) that should be able to be drilled out and filled with the welder, so no patching will be necessary... if you look on the bottom, though, you can just start to see the swiss cheese of the gutter.

After seeing how much elbow grease the hood needed, Mike asked me to try the blaster out on the roof, which is in about the same shape the hood was before several hours of grinding and sanding... the result was somewhat promising, and when combined with some 120 grit on the random-orbital sander should make for much less scotch-brite padding with the acid.

The recesses where the wiper arms mount were pretty nasty, and I was worried they might have some rust forming, but actually, it's not bad at all. And, the biggest relief of the night came when I started working the windshield sealing surface and found it to have no significant rust at all.

The one good thing about the really coarse sand is that it breaks down as it hits the metal, so you start with 20, then it wears to maybe 40 or 50. Then, you suck it all up with your trusty Shop Vac (which you had the foresight to actually buy the extended warranty on, since it's going to spend its life sucking up sand and metal, and also which you emptied out before starting the sandblasting) and give it another go, using the tank as a hopper instead of the inconvenient bags. And once it's empty, you vacuum the sand up yet again, and this time it's basically the same size as the fine stuff I set out to buy in the first place - which means I'll get 3-4 more uses out of this $20 worth of sand than I would had the finer stuff been in stock.

Tomorrow (Saturday) will be more blasting, plus dismantling of the core support.

I had a ton of sand in my crack. It was not  pleasant.

After tonight I'm both frozen (33 when I gave up for the night) and rust-free.

Hope you're wearing a good respirator! That Black Diamond makes a nasty dust cloud.

You guys make any progress over the holidays?

I got to Mike's last night at 9pm and unhooked the car trailer, copied 40GB of video to his external hard drive and started an FTP upload batch job, and got home at 1. I did nothing of any value to the truck while over there.
Mike finished blasting the cab while I was in Texas chasing skirts and K-car pictures, and it needs to be moved so we can blast the underside of the hood, the fenders, and the doors. Also the bed, at some point.
I'm going straight over after work tonight, so if you want to come help us move the cab out of the booth and get it ready for the last bits of welding, you're more than welcome!

Another workday Monday, since I was off anyway...

I decided I would stop by the fixed-price LKQ yard by my house and see what they had in stock, knowing we need a p/s door and fender. I found a couple prospects, and so I had Mike text me a pic of the door and fender so I could make sure the bodylines were the same. While he was doing that, I started looking up fender interchange, only to find out that 80-86 is unique; 87-96 will basically swap directly, but the earlier trucks have a completely different wheel arch treatment, and a vestigial front bottom corner where the "newer" ones had nothing. Anyway, after finally getting a picture texted and comparing, and some fighting and lots of cussing because the 13mm socket was missing from my small junkyard toolbox (and it was the only tool other than a #2 philips & T20 screwdriver, and a 3/8" ratchet I needed to remove the door) I had the door in hand and paid the $80 ($60 for the door, $12 core, plus tax and an "environmental fee: )

After heading out, I stopped by Tractor Supply to get a replacement for the broken compressor motor pulley, then got out there and unloaded the door and set about finishing up the last bits of sandblasting on the cab. Once that was done, we moved it out of the booth so that Mike could do a little more welding on it, and so we could sand and prep the roof and bottom.

About that time Tim and Greg showed up, so I put Greg to work sandblasting the p/s fender (the next metalworking project is the repair of the rusted-away front corner)  and other pieces that still needed done, and set Tim to work on the underside of the hood...

... and I went to work with the RO sander on the roof.

It was slow going on the hood because we had burned up all of our flap discs and strip discs, so Tim had to use a coarse-knot wire brush to strip the paint. Since this was less than ideal, and since Greg finished up the parts I had left for him, Tim moved the hood inside the booth and let Greg have at it. Then, I brought the new door over and had Tim get started on stripping it down. Someone had repaired the seal at some point with double-sided trim tape, so it took a lot of elbow grease for him to get it off...

And then, we did something that's been a long time coming. After a final chemical cleaning of the metal...

... Mike mixed up 8oz the two-part epoxy primer, and I set up the gun and shot of many coats onto the cab. Bear in mind this was just a test run, since it's the underside of the cab and will pretty much never be seen again.

I've gotta put more heat to the primer to get it to harden because it was too cool out when it was sprayed last night. Does anybody know if there's such a thing as a halfway-decent 500W halogen bulb? It feels like I'm averaging about 45 minutes per HF bulb (but at 2/99c it's almost OK.)
We'll try to spray the roof today, barring too-high humidity...

UMMM, 2.2 Chrysler needs you.  Kim, Brette, Katie and Chelsie need you.

Restore and paint my Deuce next!!!   

Buddy. 

Ooo okay

Thursday went according to plan, amazingly...

I started out by finishing up the Neon, while Mike took the grinder to a couple spots in the floorpan that he wasn't quite satisfied with. After about an hour of busting my knuckles putting the Neon back together, I was done and ready to spray the epoxy I had told Mike to mix up (remember, it has to "cook" for at least 30 minutes above 70*F, and an hour below 70. I got the paint gun set up and began painting the floor, and putting a second coat on the roof. I've already improved substantially, but there's still loads of room for improvement. Before this project the last time I held a paint gun was when I shot some of the interior of the NSF Racing 1950 Mercedes-Benz 170S... and before that, sometime during the nascent years of the Clinton administration. Anyway, with that paint mostly used up, and Tim and Greg finally arriving to help with the cab flip, I hung the gun up and we all grabbed a corner and lifted the cab up and onto its pivot point, then sat it back down on the dolly. That nice black paint shouldn't ever see the direct light of day again. :up:

So now, with the cab properly upright and the roof "good enough," I sprayed the remainder of the paint I had in the gun onto the outside of back wall of the cab, and part of the outside of the firewall. Of course, before spraying that I had to disassemble my gun, because this epoxy sets up really fast, and it had plugged my nozzle in the 15 minutes we took to rotate the cab. Whoops. At least it cleans up really easily with lacquer thinner when it's still wet.

In this new light, the small dents and dings in the roof are really visible, and the epoxy really exaggerates them. These are all really shallow dents, and since there's no access to the backside of them, and we don't have a spot welder/puller, we're just going to feather in some filler and call it good. These huge-looking dents are very small and shallow, and I purposely shot them in this exaggerated light to show them off...
The small dent in the rear cab wall will also get filled.

After the flip we had to mix up the remaining primer we had on hand, so while it cooked we started inspecting our work. The gutters and inside cab corners were areas of special concern, and I got the brilliant idea to take a small brush and really pack the epoxy down in the gaps, much more tightly than the spray gun could possibly blow it in. We'll have to sand out a few runs, but the high-build primer we spray on next will cover most of the little runs and flubs up nicely.

We also handed Tim and Greg grinders with strip-discs mounted and let them have at the doors. The difference in paint and primer between an '86 and a '94 is tremendous - I don't think we'll even bother fully stripping the white door, and instead just get some etching primer for it. I'm also still considering going back and getting the other door off the junkyard '94 F250, so the only visible difference (the front corner of the vent window) matches. Greg was working the blue door, and had progressed to here after about 30 minutes:

... meanwhile, Tim had only gotten this far:

I'll probably wind up just blasting the paint off (and we're not even going to bother trying to disc the d/s fender) since the $10-a-pop strip discs aren't really doing as good a job at removing the old paint as I'd like. And once the doors are done, we've got to make a set of body shop stands to hang them on for primer and paint. And then we can start working on the bed.

So, here's where I left it at 1:30 this morning. As you can see, I've still got quite a few spots I have to get at inside the cab, mostly at weird angles. Tonight I'll be able to get inside the cab and move around, which I couldn't last night because the primer was still drying, and I should be able to make pretty short work of it. I've gotta buy another $80 quart of primer, though, unless the gallon is considerably cheaper; I estimate we'll need about 1.5qts to finish the whole truck, and having extra on hand would be nice for the Ramcharger, plus Mike has decided he wants to repaint the tank on his R6... and I really need to fix the rear d/s door on my truck, and the p/s bedside on his Dmax Chevy needs replaced as well.

Last night while Tim and Greg finished enclosing the paint booth (a big deviation from my original plans for it) Mike and I worked on the cab.

The epoxy I laid down the night before was nice and dry by the time I got out after working til 6:30 and then meeting Mike at Horrible Freight for a new roll-around toolbox and some other stuff we needed. Once we confirmed that it was in fact ready to be worked on, we hit it with red Scotch-brite pads and decided that we should probably lay the seam sealer down...

Basically we just put it back where it was originally, but this stuff should be a lot better than the crap they used in 1986. I hope it is, anyway...

Yes, it's a messy application. This shit is so thick it bonds to the nitrile gloves and eventually the fingertips pull off them as you're smearing it around. I figured out a bit too late that the U-Pol cleaner we have (that's basically a degreaser/surfacer to be used before spraying the epoxy) has the neat property of not letting the sealer stick to it, so a piece of shop towel soaked with the stuff kinda floats on the top and lets you tool it a little. We did this on the rain gutters and a few other spots, but the stuff in the cowl had already set up too much to work.

Like I said, everywhere there was sealer from the factory... it's also all along the firewall, around the seat mounting points, and on the back wall, and somehow I only used two of the three tubes I bought.

Not much else to show, but here's the high-build surface after three pretty thick coats. Mike is working it with 320-grit right now, and I'm about to head out to with the heavy sanding before we give the important areas (i.e., the roof, pillars, and rear window surround area) a wet-sand with some 1000-grit. And then we'll wait around for Tim and Greg to come back out so we can move the cab over and ready it for color.