Paint the Firewall "American Pride"
By Bruce Michaels

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    When Bruce Michaels' send in updates for his 1951 Chevy 3600 NAPCO Conversion, we were blown away but this neat surprise under the hood! Bruce was good enough to send along the "how to" for this "conversion" along with some good photos. Enjoy!

The Flag

    First I pained the entire firewall white. Then I had 50 stars made out of sticker material and applied them to the star field area. I masked that section off and painted the blue.

    After that dried, I masked off the red stripe area and painted the red.

    Then I spent days fixing all the little flaws in it. When I was satisfied with it, I coated it with five coats of clear. All the paint I used was a good two-part polyurethane. The trick to painting with poly is to paint a really fine coat and then wait several minutes and paint another coat. I usually painted four or five coats to get the results I wanted. If you paint it too thick or to quickly, it will RRRRUUUUUNNNNNNN!! (I learn by doing!! :-) )

    If you want to go the extra step, you can mask off all the red and blue, and re-paint all the white to get it to come up to the level of the other colors. Then sand the whole flag with really fine paper (thousand grit or so). That way you won't have any color higher then the other.

    Then the last step would be to paint on the clear. This is how I'm going to do my flag the next time.

    If you have any questions just let me know.

Bruce
BRUCE L MICHAELS,
MSG, CA ANG
Maintenance Operations Flight

About the author ~~

    I was I the Air Force but now I'm in the Air National Guard. I was an Aircraft Mechanic for years but now I'm an Aircraft Controller/Scheduler. We have C130 Hercules Aircraft. I'm stationed at Channel Islands Air National Guard Base, in California.

    I painted the flag on there myself. It took a lot of work. But I have some sad news too. Three weeks ago I had an accident and the truck went up in a fire. Here's a picture after the fire. I was in tears for days. The flag is totally gone.

    But the truck is fixable! I was at about 80% finished before the fire and now I'm back to about 50% complete (with a LOT of cleanup).

    And I do have to tell you the flag "WILL" be back!! And now that I've had practice at applying it, it should even come out better the second time around.

September 16, 2004

v. Jan 05