A banner day today! With Jerry’s help we were able to finish up the last of the planned paint work. We started the day masking off the beige paint on the hood and front fenders. The hood went pretty easy, but the fenders were a total pain. We had to mask almost all of each fender just so that I could paint the front top corner of each one with orange so that the would line up with the doors and the hood. The Dodge factory solution was a couple of addon metal pieces that were painted to match the hood and doors. Unfortunately they didn’t fit worth a darn and made the alignment of the doors and fenders a real pain.

After the masking was done we cleaned up the remaining interior trim pieces, window frames etc, and coated them with PPG 3025 sealer.

Sealing the Window Frames and Trim Pieces

After the sealer had set for a minimum of 15 minutes it could be top coated. During the 15 minute wait time with moved the fenders down to the floor and bungee corded them to the booth PVC frame. That freed up the parts tree so that we could jig up the tail & lift gates that had been previously sealed. I covered the my four bench scaffolds with plastic and used them to hold the window frames and the rear splash pans.

Finishing Up the Madagascar Orange Pieces

I tacked all of the pieces and wet the floors with my hand sprayer while Jerry mixed up the Madagascar orange paint. I used my small 1.0 mm HF Detail HVLP gun to spray the window frames and my 1.4 mm Iwata to spray the hood and tailgate and the rest of the larger pieces. Once again we over reduced the PPG Concept and this time I increased the material flow, added a couple of psi to the gun inlet and widened the pattern from 6-8 inchs up to 10 to 12 inches. Using a 50% overlap and watching the spray line I was able to lay down three nice wet coats with little orange peel, no runs, but with a bit too much overspray. Next time I will back off the inlet air to 16-18 lbs and pump the feed up a bit to see if I can cut down the overspray. All in all this was the closest to being properly set up yet! To make things even better I was able to get almost identical results with the detail gun on the window frames. Had I been able to get this good of a set up at the start it would have reduced my color sanding by a whole bunch!

Oh well, live in learn, that is what it is all about. The next one will be better!

Tomorrow, I hope to get the wagon back into the booth to sand down the problems on both front doors, then touch up the repairs using the detail gun. Once the paint has had a chance to setup, I will push the wagon outside and take down the booth so that I can get the wagon on the lift to pull the third member from the rear end and to remove the steering column. I plan on taking both of them down to the valley to be rebuilt when we go down on Wednesday.

Now I really really need to order the damn suspension rebuild parts! We maybe looking at getting the engine and transmission back in the wagon yet this month!