Well, for anyone out there that's been waiting w/bated breath for the
rusted wheels resto process...today's your lucky day! :0)
Since the following is pretty self-explanatory, let's jump into the
photos & dispense with all the pretty verbiage.
Comparison of wet-sanded/polished LF fender vs rest of truck as purchased (Also blacked out steelies by PO)
You must be registered for see images attach
If this was PBS's Antiques Roadshow I'd be in the photo wearing a goofy bowtie and
waxing poetic about how the patina on this work truck documents the struggles
and oppression that it has suffered since lumbering off of the Arlington, TX
assembly line back in the summer of '99.
The reality is that cameras are pretty forgiving of older paint jobs -- what looks
OK in a photo often looks weathered in person. Like all sun damage, the original
clear coat on this truck was turning opaque, some on the sides, much more so
on the horizontal surfaces.
Before I started with the wet-sanding & polishing, the left front fender was an
exact visual match of the rest of the truck. It's amazing how removing the
dead/opaque outer layer of clear coat can reveal the color coat underneath
with like-new clarity. NOTE: My goal was for the vehicle to not look 'polished'
(ie: swirl-marks, etc) ...but instead for the paint to simply look new.
If all 4 tires looked this good I might have just left them alone, but as you
saw back in post #4 the passenger side wheels looked pretty rough.
So I had the tires dismounted so I could take care of business in the blast cab.
Inside of steel wheels heavily rusted / Using Black Beauty coal slag at 120psi
You must be registered for see images attach
Same wheel, front face after 2nd pass using finer media
You must be registered for see images attach
Sometimes I'll prime/sand/prime/sand/loop on error... until I am satisfied with
the quality of the underlying surface. (They aren't kidding when they say that
surface prep is
everything!) Seriously, when I decided to make the investment
into this Skat Blast cab, I was just trying to claw back most the time I was
spending (trying) to get parts clean enough to inspect/paint/reinstall.
This was back in '06. At that time for every 10 items I painted, I would be
disappointed in 9 of them. They never looked like they were painted at the
factory...they looked like *I* painted them, normally due to flaws underneath
the new paint surface drawing undo attention to themselves. Very disappointing
to spend all that time & then not wanting anyone else to see the finished result. :-(
Once we figured out which media was the best for the task at hand (Black Beauty
for the scaly stuff, all the way to crushed walnut shell for engine blocks & aluminum
heads) this cab was *much* faster than all the other surface prep methods we had
used before. (wire brushes, flap wheels, sanders of all flavors, etc)
And before could I put 2 and 2 together, my overall satisfaction with the paint finishes
flipped -- now when I painted 10 items, 9 of them were satisfactory! (I never get
10/10, there's always sumptin' wrong. :0)
So the photo above is the secret sauce of driving old in the rust belt. Surface prep
is everything...so you might as well do it as fast as humanly possible & get it over with!
Given that this is supposed to be a work vehicle, plus the fact that the 'facing out' surface
was all but blemish free, I simply primed, color coated, and clear coated the wheel before
popping them into the oven for a 90 minute bake at ~200 degrees.
You must be registered for see images attach
The finished product. As close as I could get the original 20+ year old rust belt steelies to look like the factory painted them Indigo Blue metallic.
You must be registered for see images attach
OK, GMT400 has just told me that there's a limit of 5 attachments,
so I'll pickle this & wrap it up in the next posting...
