Grilling in the Hood

The front grille that came with the truck was in sorry shape. One of the cross members was crushed, several were split and overall it was covered with a category EF5 on the Enhanced Fujita Rust scale.  In other words, it was a disaster. So instead of spending countless hours repairing it, I decided to purchase a refurbished grille on eBay. This way I could spend my time at the brew pub instead of the hillbilly garage.

The eBay grille came primed and ready to paint, according to the seller’s description. The dilemma was, did the seller really do a good job with the prep work. I thought about asking TSA to help since they could x-ray scan it, but they just don’t have a sense of humor. As it turns out I waited about four weeks before I was able to work on the grille and I was disappointed (but not surprised) to see rust blooming everywhere. Glad I waited.

My friend Dale came over to help last weekend and I asked if he would work on the grille. He agreed and proceeded to take it apart. Drilling out the rivets did required “special” tools, which I knew he was itching to put to use. Once the grille was disassembled he used a sander/grinder to remove the paint and rust on every dad gum piece.

My task for the day was to weld in a replacement part on the hood support where it had rotted out. We both worked all of Saturday and Dale shamed me once again by completely finishing the prep work on all the grille parts. I did weld in my little part, but it didn’t seem like much by comparison.

The next task was to prepare the underside of the hood before it was primed. It took most of the next day to wire brush and sand off the rust and old paint. When I was done the underside of the hood was shiny and bright just like new. However, the next morning everything had flash rusted and I was back to ground zero.

I am convinced that Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, was not weaving and unweaving a burial shroud to stave off her suitors, but was really working in a chariot shop. During the day she would sand the rust off the chariot fenders and each night they would flash rust. She would start over the next day and repeat the process. In fact I think Odysseus was really a used chariot traveling salesman.

Once again I resorted to my chemical dependency and was able to remove the flash rust with Eastwood’s Fast Etch. With the rust converted I sprayed on the epoxy primer. Sweet.

I am finding that as I get more experienced and skilled with each stage of the restoration, it is harder to find interesting stories. Only Penelope would be interested if I described the technical details of applying body filler and sanding it to a smooth contour. But I do find that Stephanie is much happier with my progress.

The plan for this weekend was to finish the top of the hood. I sprayed on the urethane sanding primer and was disappointed by the rough texture of the coating. In discussing my technique with Dale, my spiritual and technical advisor, I discovered that I was spraying at 10 psi when I should have been spraying with a pressure of 50 psi. Here is the deal, at 10 psi it is like pooping out mash potatoes onto the hood. And of course they are lumpy. However at 50 psi, even mashed potatoes get atomized and a fine mist coats the part being painted. Employing my new technique I put a black top coat on the hood a dayum it looks good. The next step is to take it to Boo Jack to put on the final color coat.

Happy Day

The grille that came with the 54 Chevy truck.

Dale at work on the grille.

Rust coming through the primer.

The replacement metal for the rotted area.

Grille parts preped and ready to go.

One side is clean and the other side has the flash rust.

Grille parts primed.

Nectar of the Gods.

The underside of the hood primed.

Body filler on the hood.

Urethane primer on the hood.

Black top coat on the hood.

A New Column

For those of you that don't subscribe to the Huntsville Times, my Sunday column was published this week. It is not related to the truck project.

Hope you enjoy it.

Brimmer

http://blog.al.com/times-views/2012/03/a_race_against_pride_the_clock.html

After my daughter had run well in a local one-mile race, I thought we could try a 5K race. Neither of us really had any knowledge about road racing, other than the basics - run like hell to the finish line.
A 5K is 5,000 meters long, which seemed like a lot until I got it translated into English.
It turns out to be a little over three miles. If Brooke ran one mile, surely she could run three - she was a 6-year-old after all.
....

You Never Forget Your First Fender

The time had come after too many weeks of puttering around on the front fender to paint it and see if my body work was any good. My internal project clock was ticking, time to get something done.

I decided on a deep blue and started making the rounds to the car lots. Selecting the actual color from a paint chip is risky business; they are just too small to get the full impact of the color. The best way to insure you have the right one is to see it on another vehicle. I made many new friends at the dealers, all the sales people suggested that I just buy a car with the color I liked – they were just looking out for my best interest. I picked a hot color – Blue Topaz Metallic.

I had bumbled through the body work because I could fix my mistakes. Didn’t Confucius say, “the best lessons are learned from your mistakes”. I didn’t have any idea how to fix my inevitable painting boo-boos and frankly wasn’t sure if my body work was good enough. I wanted a professional to spray the fender.

I figured the guys at the paint shop could give me a few names since surely my orders were not keeping them in business.  When I asked for some names, they said that none of the pros would touch anything unless they did all the body work. You have to be kidding me, here I spend months working on the fender and now no one will touch it because they don’t know if I did a good job. The ring of truth in the statement knocked me to my knees. Since I was already down I started begging and pleading, I think he gave me a few names just to get me out of the store.

The first guy I called said he would paint my fender and gave me all the disclaimers that he couldn’t be held responsible for my “shoddy” workmanship. He wasn’t Confucius after all. He told me the paint and supplies to buy, which turned out to be the very best that the paint store sold – now I know why they suggested him.

Bare with me on this.  I bought a quart of color coat, a gallon of clear, reducer and hardener - all for the tidy sum of $500 dollars. Remember this is just for test run. I know this is a conspiracy. Each step of this project requires higher priced materials.  By the time I am ready to purchase the batteries, I will be so conditioned that when the salesperson says they are $1,000 each and you need twenty. I will say – is that your best shot; I spent more than that just painting my fender.

I am now ready to take my beloved fender and expensive paint to the painter. I give him one more call to make sure he is in and now I get the run around, he is just to “slammed” to fit this into his schedule. After a few minutes I can tell that he really doesn’t want to do it. Better to find out now than after I get a poor paint job.

Not to be daunted, I call another painter and thankfully he is very accommodating. He even said to bring it over that afternoon.  When I got there and explained that I was doing a frame up restoration and doing the body work myself, he asked how long I had been doing body work. I replied – a long time, about two months and all of it on this fender.  That’s when he said he needed to examine my workmanship and that he had a few questions for me. To my great relief he complemented my workmanship and said he would paint it. While we were discussing the price, he did point out one spot that could be improved, there was a hollow spot near the bottom, and he said for a few extra dollars he would fix anything he didn’t like before he sprayed it.  Deal.

When he said he would spray it the next day and I could pick it up on Saturday, I thought I was in heaven. I didn’t hear anything on Friday but at 7:30 am Saturday I got the call and went to pick it up.

It was a sight to behold, nothing has ever looked this good to me. In fact I am taking down our flat screen TV in the living room and putting this fender on the wall over the fire place.  I don’t need to watch West Coast Customs anymore.

Here is the before picture and another of the unfinished fender.

New Sunday Column - Orange just isn't a color for a home in Huntsville's historic district

For those of you that do not get the Sunday Huntsville Times, here is the link to my column.

Orange just isn't a color for a home in Huntsville's historic district (By Brimmer Sherman)

http://blog.al.com/times-views/2012/02/orange_just_isnt_a_color_for_a.html

Welding Will Test Your Mettle

When restoring a 57 year old truck that has spent the last ten years outside in northern Minnesota, one expects some badly rusted areas. The text book remedy is to cut out the rotted area and weld in replacement sheet metal. Now I don’t know about your image of welding, but mine is a big automotive shop filled with parts and machines, men wearing masks and gloves, with sparks flying. It is a loud and noisy business with big burly men that have beards and tattoos. Quite frankly I am more than a little intimidated by it all.

My one welding experience was in high school, a friend’s dad had a welding shop and one day he let us play at welding. After I got the hang of it, I was using scrap metal to weld together a fine piece of abstract art. Did I say “scrap metal”? It turns out I had picked up a key part of a metal bending tool and welded it in the middle of my masterpiece.  Needless to say when his dad came back to the shop and saw what this knothead had done in the name of art - well go back to the image of big burley men with bandanas, tattoos, sparks flying, and now mad as hell. He took an acetylene torch to my project and that was the end of my formal welding training. I gave serious thought to entering a seminary.

With the top of the hood primed, the next step was to flip it over and work on the bottom.  Anytime you turn something over to work on the underside, you are bound to find some surprises and this was no exception. One of the hood supports had a serious case of rust rot.  It looked like SpongeBob SquarePants and I thought about selling it on eBay until I remembered that people only bought Jesus and Elvis images.

I was out of my league on this but I put on my big boy panties and followed the instructions in the manual. The first step was to cut out the malignancy - nurse hand me the cutoff saw and the impact hammer. Another successful rustectomey, Dr. Sherman.

The next step was to fabricate the replacement sheet metal part. Necessity is the mother of invention, since I didn’t have any real sheet metal shaping tools; I got my wife’s rolling pin, my vise grips, my daughter’s curling iron, and my neighbors Susan Summers Thigh Master and started shaping the metal. After a few nips and tucks I ended up with a plausible replica of the replacement part.

We all tell our children that you have to practice in order to develop a skill. I actually had been practicing my welding several weeks ago and did a few practice runs before attempting the real deal. Just look at my practice lines – sweet. If this project doesn’t work out I am going to Pigeon Forge and open a shop where I weld people’s initials in old car parts. In fact I am taking orders now, my specialty is capital I’s and lowercase l’s

The last step is to weld the replacement part in place. This is were I feel like I am in a cooking show, you know when the chef puts the stuffed duck in the bottom oven and then takes the fully cooked bird out of the top oven. What they don’t show you is the several hours of welding, grinding, wire brushing, and welding some more to finish the job. After all this I am ready to challenge Cat Cora on Iron Chef in the rusty metal battle.

Prime the Hood

Uncle Remus, Uncle Remus, tell us what happened this week in the Hillbilly Garage. Well chrin, I worked all weekend on that ornery 1954 Chevy truck and by golly if I didn’t prep and spray primer on the hood and get the front fenders mostly done. Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, Yippen Farcheesy and Roll Tide. Mostly done is okay as it is progress, but I am going to be so happy once I start getting things really done.

When I was in the construction business there were a couple of sayings we commonly quoted. One was “straight like Apache arrow”, the meaning is self evident and it is a useful saying when you are doing leveling and plumbing tasks. The second one was “smooth like mamma’s xxx”. Several options can be used to fill in the blank, they all highlight the posterior aspect of the feminine form. This saying is often used to describe finely finished work that has a smooth and highly polished surface. It takes years of hands on experience before one qualified to make this statement. The “smooth like…” saying crosses over from construction to the automotive vernacular - body work is a tactile sensory enterprise in any industry.

It feels like I have been working half my life on the front fenders, finally they are almost to the smoothness point of the aforementioned saying. Spray on the primer, sand the primer, run your hand along the surface, repeat until it is “smooth like…”. Only one more coat, I promise.

The hood has been another epic piece of work. Both Stephanie and I have sanded our fingers to the nubs, working to get it prepped. As a last resort we used rust eating chemicals to assuage our rust malaise.  The use of chemicals is a double edged sword, they eat the rust, but getting them to stop is problematic. Water will wash off the chemicals but then the hood starts to rust all over again. Since I haven’t been able to prep and paint in one weekend, the pristine hood on Sunday is covered with a fine patina of rust by Saturday. It is a never ending cycle.

This weekend I finally neutralized the chemical cocktail, sanded the hood to bare metal, and sprayed on the etching primer - it was sweeeeet!  But wait, the paint was acting up.  I have read about the problems one can encounter when on the spray paint road. To wit: fish eye, blistering, crazing (my personal favorite, in fact I want it), pin holing, orange peel, and mumbly peg. Uncle Remus you forget to include “sagging”? Why my oh my I did skip that one, cause that’s what I gots – the sags. Technically speaking the coefficient of paint adhesion was exceeded by the verticality ratio to the volume of material that was incontinent with the reduction additive. In English - I sprayed to damn much paint on the damn part. Not to worry, at this point it can be sanded out and all will be well in the briar patch.

Still it was a glorious weekend and progress is progress. Another saying I like is: Man with respirator on is one thirsty mechanic.



Bear With Me

Hey, I greatly appreciate that all y’all are interested in the truck project and have subscribed to the blog. Last October the Huntsville Times solicited writers to apply for the 2012 community columnist position. I sent in a couple of my posts and was pleasantly, no greatly surprised to find out I had been selected. This means that I get to publish a column the first Sunday of each month. Writing a monthly column at first seemed daunting, but now that I have done one, only eleven more will not be enough.

When the editor called to let me know I was selected he said he liked the truck stories, but  some of the other editors wondered if I was going to do all the articles about the truck - could you write about some other things as we have a broad and diverse base of interest. My quick reply was "Yes, of course, exactly my plan", but we all know what the real plan was. You can let me know next month if I can.

If you are interested in reading the column it is online a www.al.com in the Huntsville opinion section. Here is the direct link.

http://blog.al.com/times-views/2012/01/truck_restoration_attempt_spur.html

The new writers are introduced in the "New Year, New Voices" column.

http://www.al.com/opinion/huntsville/

Thanks so much.