When our good friend Greg dropped by for a visit last month he asked if I was going to re-coat the areas on the bottom of the floor that I had removed the undercoating to replace the rusted out panels. Of course I had not intended upon doing it, since I didn’t feel that anyone would ever look under the wagon, but he maintained that someone would and that I needed to make everything look uniform so that folks would not know that any work had been done.

Groan, of course he was right…

I always believe in trying the easy way 1st to see if it will work. In this case the easy way was to use 3M aerosol spray undercoat, which actually worked pretty good, but it did not lay down enough texture to make it look like the original tar that the factory used.

Next stop, Herculiner truck bed coating. This is a very nice product when used as intended, i.e. painting to top of a truck bed floor, not so great when paint the bottom of the wagon’s floor. What material that I got to stay on the bottom of the floor actually looks pretty much like the stock material. The problem was that it dripped all over the place, including in to my hair, on my arms, on my face and even through my tee shirt and on to my chest hair. What a frickin mess. I soldiered on and finally got most of the bare spots covered in. I used lacquer thinner to try to clean the black spots off the floor and all I was able to do was to soften the floor coating which then mixed with the black and orange that was left over from painting the floor. The end result was a grey swirly mess. By the time I got around to cleaning myself up the damn stuff had kicked off and was quite hard. Michelle had to use a comb and scissors to cut out most of the goo. The really really really bad part was when I used lacquer thinner to remove the goo from my chest woo boy, you don’t ever want to have to put lacquer thinner on your nipples! NOT GOOD!

Repairing the Undercoat
Once the bed liner had dried I sprayed it with some black satin paint to blend it with the rest of the floor. It looks okay, and was probably worth the effort but… damn that burned!!!