Time to look for some modern replacements that I can fold in.

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Mater's back from the shop.

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The 1957 Chevy 6100 Wrecker is home.  Thanks to Ray, and R. Lance and Sons Towing. http://rlanceandsons.com/

It looks uncannily like Tow Mater from Pixar's Cars movie but I'm going to resist naming it "Mater".  It's too cliche; and this is a serious work truck!  Maybe "Bessy"; Not sure.  The truck will eventually name itself; until them I'm just calling it

the 57Wrekr.

Current Todo List:

Rear Brake Drums are Seized; Unseize them.

Rear Brake Lines are Cut; Replace them.

The Rims may be unsafe widow-makers; Have them checked.

The Tires are Dry-rotted; Replace them.

Windshield is severely broken; Replace it.

Driver Side Vent window is missing; Find a replacement.

The bench seat is nasty; Fix or Replace.

Then drive it!

It last ran in May, starting it should only require fluid changes, and a nicely charged battery.

Big props to Ray and R.Lance it was fun going to pick it up, and it went very smoothly.

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This time I saw that the chips went all the way down to metal. (Top right grey color)

I had a couple of choices, ignore it some more, repaint the whole truck, or try to fix it myself.

Ignore it certainly hadn't helped up to this point, and I knew I had some white paint leftover from my repair of under the battery compartment of the Jeep.  I thought it would be a pretty good match. 

It's funny, I'm not a fan of white vehicles, and yet I have two trucks painted the whitest white you can imagine. It certainly wasn't intentional thats just the color they came with, and I'm very much a function over form kinda guy.  I wouldn't turn down a good truck just because it was white.

Materials: my auto masking tape, sanding pad, 1000 grit wet sand paper, old newspapers, old t-shirts, and paint prep cleaner (all left over from my wheel resto project). I  used the low grit sand pad to knock off any weak chips and to round off the edges of the remaining paint. I gave the windshield a slight dusting overspray after the first pass, so after this photo I cleaned it off and put more newspaper up to keep that from happening again. You need more newspaper than you think.

I used the 1000grit to knock the edge off the new paint where it abutted the masking tape.  It's a Good From Far, but Far From Good job.  There is a slight hue difference between the white paints, and theres a difference in the surface texture, but I made the ridge to be in the middle of the curve so it's very difficult to see it if your more than 10' away.  I should have practiced with some body filler and additional sanding, but I'll do that next time.  It does the job for now.

So heres the true out of pocket repair cost: $0; I already had everything from other projects, and still plenty of paint in the rattle can for a few more projects. 

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This is what I started with:

Back from the sandblaster ($15/wheel)

After 3 coats of Duplicolor Self Etching Primer (DAP 1690), and 2 light coats and a med coat of Duplicolor High Performance Silver Wheel Coating (WP 101).  * see notes about colors later.
This is also where things start going awry.  I had purchased the 14" Rally II Mask Kit from Ames, which turned out to be a waste in effort and quality.  They are essentially a material that's consistent with shipping labels, they came on a sheet as peel and sticks.  The mask makes no provisions for masking the small 1/4" ring that surrounds the parts that will be charcoal on the face of the rim.  I had "Assumed" the mask kit, was a complete mask. Not so.  The "stick" part of the mask was also a lie.  It didn't stick well, as you can see in this photo. It will come into play later.  I went out looking for some 3m pinstriping tape to try to mask off the areas that the Ames mask didn't cover; couldn't find any with my local loop of Monument Auto Parts, Autozone, OSH, Lowes... I settled on the Automotive masking tape you see in the photo below.  The auto masking tape $4.99 worked better than the mask kit. I could put it down, there is a small ridge between in what would be the charcoal sections, pressing my thumbnail into the depression made a crisp crease, that I could then use as a guide with my pocket knife to cut away the masking tape leaving a nice edge as the mask.  I knew at this point I should rip off the stupid mask kit and just use the masking tape for the spokes. But I ignored my common sense and stubbornly moved forward.  Damnit I paid for them I'm going to use them.

Not shown but there's also the problem of masking the wheel sides, after failed attempts to use a larger 3m masking tape, it just did not want to flex in a circle without coming off the wheel, I crafted a piece of corrugated cardboard into a cylinder that fit over the masking tape in the groove between the wheel face and wheel rim. The only downside to this, was the corrugated cardboard with an uneven cut left room for a little bit of the charcoal to over-spray into the void which I later had to touch up with the silver paint. The darker color is Duplicolor WP102 Graphite.

While painting the graphite color, just as I made a the final pass, one of the stupid mask labels popped up, and I covered the tip of one of the spokes in graphite.  After some expletives, I decided the wheels had enough coats of the graphite color and called it quits.  Once the wheels were dry, I sprayed some of the silver onto a piece of cardboard until it pooled, and I used a craft paintbrush to cover up the graphite over-spray on the spoke that had popped up.

When I had ordered the mask kit from Ames I also asked about the red Pontiac insert in the center wheel caps.  They didn't have a record of a part number for it. I asked about the entire center cap, and apparently its been discontinued.  To make mine red again I used a red sharpie ($0.95), that I spotted as I was checking out after buying some tools at OSH.

Now, about the colors. Despite being armed with known good Duplicolor Paint Numbers that would match the original OEM paints, Nobody locally had them in stock. To order them online would have meant waiting at least five to seven days for them to come via ground.  I settled on the Duplicolor paints above because they were, in stock, close enough to the hues I was after, and I was willing to sacrifice correctness for getting the wheels painted and having the car off the jack stands by the following weekend when my dad comes to visit.  A rolling running car is a lot more interesting than one on Jackstands.  And ultimately my plan is to replace the wheels anyway with some 18x8".  So they just needed to look decent, I didn't need correct. A Pontiac enthusiast will immediately be able to detect that these paints are highly metallic and the graphite is not a dark charcoal, and they are most certainly not correct.  But they do look good.

I am not an expert, and certainly won't be winning any concourse awards for my handiwork, but I'll give you the benefit of my limited wheel painting experience.

If I were to do this again, I would definitely have them sandblasted, I tried cleaning them with a 2000 psi power-washer, which was a waste of time, have them blasted.  I used Maas Bros Powder Coating, and I found that if I had allotted enough time for them to do it, they could have powder coated the wheels in the correct Silver/Argent for $50/wheel.  I thought that was expensive at the time, but considering it took me from 6am to 9pm, and a couple hours the next day to prep, prime, and paint these wheels it now seems like a bargain.

Have a work area in mind first.  Working on the wheels is a lot easier if you can do them all in the same stages.  My workbench couldn't hold more than three wheels at a time, so I had to do them in shifts.  I would make sure I had enough room to do all five wheels on a bench with at least a wheels space between any of the wheels. (All I needed to do was throw a longer 3/4 or 1" plywood board over my sawhorses, if I had thought about it ahead of time)

Do it indoors if you can, I did mine outdoors, and I had to pick out debris that was blown in from the trees. (It's also easier to paint by light if you are indoors) I on the other hand was outside at 9pm when it was pitch dark with my LED headlamp and work-light painting a dark graphite color.

Just mask them yourselves, and don't use the stupid tape with plastic dropcloth that you can buy at OSH it will not stick, or it'll stick to itself, trust me, just throw it away it'll cause you less frustration there. Mask it with auto-masking tape and newspaper and keep your sanity, don't bother with the silly mailing label masks.

If I were to do my cylinder column again, I would use a posterboard, and cut it very accurately. I'd also cut one for each wheel, because using only one form for all wheels it began accumulating paint on the form, and was about to start to run paint down into the work area.  You only need a cylinder about 5" tall, any taller then it starts making the only angle you can spray the paint, almost straight down.

Oh which brings me to my last annoyance.

When I remounted my wheels and was going on my first test drive, something was rubbing, majorly. It turns out that the new way to balance a tire is to install these flat lead weights that are mounted on double sticky tape on the inside of the wheel. WTF?!  And they were hitting my brake calipers on the front. I dismounted the wheels and had to cut them out. I've got to drive it to the shop that did the balancing and make them do it again on all wheels to make sure I can rotate the tires.

My last lesson learned so far: The valve stems are too short once the chrome covers go on, I guess I should have known this and made sure the shop put on longer ones.  Shouldn't the shop have known this?  They are common wheels, they knew exactly what kind of car I had even if they couldn't see it.

But the wheels and that BFG rubber, look good; so in the end, it'll have been worth it.

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So I was in the second week of the "fix the sagging door" project.  

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There are 2 brake-lights each side, and 1 backup light. They each use a double pole bulb, but the backup lights don't use one side of the pole. (You can't use a single pole bulb because the pole would be aligned in the center which won't work for the stock receptacles )

The lights at the rear were the easiest to repair, you can reach them via the trunk, just twist the receptacle and it pops out.  My favorite local parts store had the replacement bulbs.  A couple of the receptacles were pretty corroded and rusted. I was able to revive all but one using a battery cleaning brush.  Went back to the parts store to get a replacement receptacle, we found only one that matched, and they only had the ONE.  Bought a crimp wiring kit as well.  Clipped the original receptacle, off, stripped both sets of wires, connected them with the crimp fitting, and reinstalled.  I think a couple of the other receptacles are pretty iffy, if I have any further problems with them I'll just replace the receptacle like I did with the backup light.

The lions share of the time this weekend was spent figuring out how to get into the instrument panel to replace the dead lamps.  After probing the dash and figuring out that it wasn't a press fit, I did some research on how to take it out.

Found a great video of a guy installing a dash cap () that showed how I had to remove the panel underneath the steering wheel by removing two screw like retainers.  With that removed there are two 5/16 Hex #10 2" machine screws that go into the bottom of the instrument panel.  I was able to able to remove one of them without a problem, the other one's head was hopelessly rounded over.  Off to the parts store again.  I found a set of Irwin Bolt extractors that included a 5/16 remover. http://www.irwin.com/irwin/consumer/jhtml/detail.jhtml?prodId=IrwinProd100518. Finding replacement 5/16 Hex #10 2"'s long turned out to be more difficult.  Checked two auto parts stores, home depot, and then finally Lowes.  At Lowes I found a match, except that it's zinc not black oxide coated like the original, and is slotted as well as hex.  But that would work for my purposes, I certainly wasn't going to put the rounded one back in.

Next step is there are three Phillips head screws that need to be removed to get the face off of the instrument panel, they are hidden at the underside of the top of the dash.  Those were simple to remove with my flex screwdriver and a magnetic bit.  This is as far as my you-tube video would take me.  I next had to figure out where the lamps were.  I ended up taking off more bolts than I needed to, and breaking a little plastic lens thats used to shuttle light from the left instrument bay to the backside of the "washer" label.  There's a number of screws that hold the plastic face on the instruments, and there's a similar number of screws that hold on the black plastic fascia that sits in front of the gauges, and allow the instrument panel to be loose inside the cavity.  I could see some of the lamps but the ones I needed to replace couldn't be gotten to from the front.  I finally figured out I had to get to the BACK of the instrument cluster, they were miniature versions of the trunk lights, I unscrewed  the receptacle then I could replace the lamp.  I couldn't get the instrument panel out at all.  Back to the internet, come to find out the speedo cable needs to be removed to allow you to get enough room to maneuver and expose the rear of the instrument panel.  There is a release right next to the speedo cable, reaching in through the underside of the dash I could push the speedo cable and the release and it came off.  I was then able to maneuver the instrument panel so that I could at least feel the rear.  It looks like to totally free the instrument panel, I would have to take the steering wheel assembly out, and theres a wiring harness that would need to be removed.  Luckily what I couldn't see I could do by feel.  All told theres about 8 lamps in the instrument panel, only about 4 that actually light the compartment, the rest are for things like trouble lamps, turn signals etc.  With the bulbs that were out replaced and tested, I began reassembly.  I started with super-gluing the lens that I broke back together, it had a nice clean break, super-gluing seemed to do the trick.  Put the speedo cable back on, it just snapped back in place.  Put the black plastic mask back on, then the clear plastic face. Putting the dash face back on was a lot harder than taking it off, I can't explain why. Perhaps the contortions I was having to do with my body to put all those screws back in.

Tested all the lights again, and then went on a test-drive.  It was the first time I've been able to see the fuel gauge at night, fantastic.

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The plastic scraper was actually a huge help in getting under the sticker and removing it in large strips. Once the sticker is off and you are just left with the adhesive, I found that just using a new section of the scrap cloth dabbed in the Goo Gone worked best.  Move to a new section of the cloth judiciously because as it picks up the adhesive it becomes slick and doesn't work as well to lift off the remaining adhesive.  The type of cloth matters too, after using several scraps cloth, I found that the ones similar to a flanel worked best. Towel type cloth would soak up too much of the GooGone. You need somethings with some fuzz for the adhesive to cling to, but you don't want the material to be able to absorb all of the GooGone.  I used some choice pieces of a "Pound of Rags" bag I had purchased at Kragens for a previous project.  It's just an assortment of odds-n-ends rags for a couple of bucks that wont have your wife yelling at you for using one of the "guest towels".  Worth every penny.

I also used a soaking wet t-shirt type rag to clean off the GooGone film from the paint on the areas that no longer had any adhesive, and another dry cloth to dry finished areas off.

The GooGone didn't discolor the paint, and unless you get really close you can't see where the pinstriping was.  But if you get close enough you can see the area that was protected from the sun is a little bit darker.  It's perfect until I'm ready to repaint.

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