So I have been getting tired of fabricating stuff for the truck. I decided to take a break from working with metal and get into something that's in the Paintmans wheel house, bed wood! At some point the previous owner put a brand new Mar-K bed and wood kit on the truck. Great you say? Nope, instead of doing a nice job on the wood with stain and clear coat , he used old motor oil every 6 months. Hence over the years the wood had taken on a dull nearly jet black finish.
Soooo, with nothing but a whole Saturday and Sunday to waste, the Paintman set out to re-claim 7 pieces of (of what would cost $400 new), oak boards
1. soak with lacquer thinner and wire brush the hell out of the boards
2. proceed with paint stripper and more wire brushing
3. follow with a good soaking of 50/50 bleach and water
4. Proceed with hours and hours of sanding
And you end up with this..............................
[/URL]
All in all the boards look damn good considering. However, there are a couple of boards with some small splits at one end . But, I have had the perfect solution sitting in my garage for about 3 years . Battery box!
[/URL]
Not exactly sure how I am going to re-finish the boards as of yet. I was kicking around the idea of staining them the same mango tango as the truck, with white strips. Or pickling the boards white with mango Tango strips. The reason I say painted strips is because they are a DISASTER! But that's another story we are working on.
I kind of nixed those 2 options in favor of just a marine varnish. I kind of like the old weathered look of wood anyway. Or possibly a golden oak stain first followed by varnish. Stay tuned.................Either way this is the varnish I will be using. As a self employed house painter and a log home owner, I stand by all Sikkens products. Applied properly the damn stuff is nearly bullet proof!
[/URL]
Hell if Mr. Magoo approves...............
[/URL]
Regardless of what I do with the tops, I did the bottoms with Por15 as this (believe it or not), produced the best results in Mar-K's testing.
[/URL]
In other news. I started the re-assemble of the windshield frame. Not to re-hash this entirely, but there was some question as to what to do. By new, go one piece glass, or try and re use this one. I opted to try and save this one for now. The first thought was to paint the frame white to match the grille but I opted for black thinking it would blend in with the gasket.
Then after reading a bunch of horror stories about trying to get the glass in with setting tape, I went to the local glass shop to see if they would do it for me. Well, after offering the guy $100 bucks and a night out with my wife, he still refused to do it! He told me it would be best to just silicone it in. So he was nice enough to give me some pieces of setting tape for alignment and a couple tubes of silicone, and tech advice for free.
So here's how I did it. To keep the glass centered in the frame so I could get an even amount of silicone on the front and back side of the glass, I wrapped and then taped small pieces of setting tape around the glass in 3 spots, top, bottom, end. Then I put a small dab of grease on the very bottom portion of the tape to help it slide into the frame. Even with this small amount of tape on the glass it was a BIOTCH!
[/URL]Then I just repeated the process on the other frame and bolted it all back together.
[/URL]
If you look close, you can see the tape wrapped around the glass inside the frame. This left an even gap on both sides of the glass, between the frame, for the silicone to go down into.
[/URL]
Here's the silicone the glass shop gave me.
[/URL]
Originaly, the biggest concern was the small amount of steel that was missing due to rot at the butt joint of the frame. Fortunately the new center divider I bought was slightly lager then the old one and covered the gap with no problem! Just waiting on a new outer gasket from Steele and back in she goes!!!!!!!!
[/URL]