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Ham's '48: The Repaint Project
I went up to check on progress on the repaint job on Ham’s ’48. Butch, the old guy whose name is on the shop and who is doing the actual work, is off for his winter vacation. But, he got some work done before he left.
The bed is off the frame and has been stripped and sanded. I don’t know if he is going to reprime it or not – we’ll see when he gets back. The tailgate looks like it’s been sanded as well.
The steps and fenders have been stripped, but still need some finish sanding.
He hasn’t really started on the front end work beyond the pressure wash paint strip-off and a little touch up on a couple of places that got dinged somehow.
The big place with paint on the back of the cab is where the pressure washer couldn’t get between the bed and the cab.
Ham's '48: The Paint Project Update 2
"So I feel your Pain with your pal Butch the slow painter. Maybe he'll finish tomorrow..."
Butch is one of those body shop artistes and I’m very lucky to have found him.
My wife brought me to Florida for February, so I can’t check up on things every week. But, I got a report from Heath, the guy who hauled the truck up to the Jeep Fest in Toledo last summer, on progress on the paint project. Heath does mechanical repair related to collision damage for Butch so they are fairly tight.
Once Butch got back from his Florida trip, he hit the job pretty hard. All of the finish sanding is done, we're not sure if he took the old primer down to bare metal or not, but I suspect that since the primer was stuck on very tightly, he sanded it down to suit him.
Everything has been shot with the base coat. He matched the darkest of the two or three colors dead nuts on. It’s still Tunisian Red – the original color. BMorgil helped us go through the PPG Paint Legacy Library and trace the original Tunisian Red through several corporate owner changes (Willys-Overland, American Motors, Chrysler, Fiat, etc) to a current paint code.
According to Heath, Butch called the insurance company and negotiated premium paint with them ($345/quart for paint, $365/quart for clear-coat).
The paint work on the bed is finished; it's wrapped up in paper and put into storage. Everything else has been painted - base coated and two coats of clear coat. I don't know if two coats of clear coat is the norm or not. He did a wet sand on the clear coat to take out any little dust flecks (that made it look like crap) and he is buffing it out. He wanted to take out the glass to get to every little place, but the glass is glued in and he would have had to break it to get it out, so he stopped at the edge of the gaskets.
We missed something in the original restoration and the bed was a bit off level if you looked at it across the back of the cab. Butch said he wasn't going to let it out of his shop looking like that - he didn't want to be blamed for it - so he put the truck on the frame jig. The laser said that it was about an inch out of square and he said it was my 1972 angle iron frame repair over the left rear wheel. He is going to tweak it and square it up before he puts the bed back on.
And, he didn’t like the hardware the first guy used to put fenders, steps and other pieces and parts on with. They were too long and they would eventually rust too badly to suit him, so he is redoing the bolts, fender washers, lock washers and nuts that tie things together to suit his standards.
I think I lucked out again with my selection of shop to do this work - but pure blind luck generally overcomes skill, cunning and forethought.
He should have it done about early March when I get back to Indiana. I’ll just have to wait for a nice day to bring it back home –it’s not going to come home through snow slop and calcium chloride soup!
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Ham's '48: The Paint Project Update 3
Well, I haven’t seen it in person as yet, but Ham’s ’48 has been moved out of the production shop over to Butch’s storage barn. It looks like it’s done. There looks like there is a clean-up job to get the sanding dust off in a few places, but those are places I clean up before show season starts.
I’ll know more in a week or so when I get back to Indiana.