You never quite get it good enough

It has been a while since my last truck post but. I assure you that I have been diligently working on the cab. Not day and night, 24/7 mind you, but consistently on the weekends when the temperature was above 60 degrees.

While the cab was in good enough shape - that is it had no rusted out spots except for the crushed corner which I successfully welded a replacement patch panel. This was an earlier post. There was still one big task remaining, it was to block sand the roof and the back. What this means is you use primer and body filler to “level” out the sheet metal, so that when you show your project to other truck guys they will rub their hand over the cab and say how good it feels.  Don’t make me explain it as it is something in guy DNA and even we don’t understand it.

Who would know working on the cab would be a three month odyssey.  Let me give you the short tour. Grind off all the paint and surface rust, prime it, fill the dents with body filler, sand until smooth, reapply body filler, sand, reapply body filler, sand, spray high fill urethane primer, sand... Okay you get the picture.

After about a month into this Sisyphean task, my wife said it was good enough and pointed out that no one would ever see the back since the bed would cover it and no one would see the top – remember she is just 5’-0”. In her opinion it was plenty good and I should just “put a fork in it”.

So I had to start working on it on the sly. I would say that I was going to church, get all dressed up and walk to the end of the block. Then I would come back to the garage and sand in the name of Jesus for the rest of the day.  I think after going to church on Saturday and Sunday for two months Stephanie started getting suspicious, maybe because in our 28 years of marriage I had never gone to church before.

Finally last week after two coats of high fill primer, I had it level and man does it feel good. I know you would expect someone to say that it “looks good”, but that is not the objective – it feels good.  Body work, excuse the pun, is a tactical experience. You know you are done when it feels right.

 

I finally told Stephanie that the cab was mostly done, just so I could stop going to “church”. The next step is to put the cab on the frame to see how well everything fits.

Now just between us girls – I am going to spray one more coat of high fill primer on the cab top, I just can’t get enough. There is always another pound to lose, another mile to run, another dash of chile powder, one more kiss, and of course it can always be smoother.

These pictures show a little bit of the progression.