This is probably the most exciting time for my truck in the past 8 years of the restoration! It's probably in reality the most exciting time for the truck since it went down the assembly line in early 1947! Dave called earlier this week to let me know that I could come pick up some of my parts. He also told me that the cab has been painted and cleared. It will sit for about 2 weeks before it can be polished out and brought home. My dad come up from Janesville with his cargo van and helped with loading the parts at Dave's and getting them in the basement when I got home. We were actually able to get both doors, the front fenders, the hood (both sides) and a bunch of misc. other parts in the back of his van without any worries about parts coming into contact with each other during the drive. To the right are a couple of photos of Dave at PaintWerks with some of the finished
finished parts.
Click here to go to my web page with all the photo details! Dave's shop is not the largest so I'm sure he was pleased to get all of this out of there so he could make room for other projects.
It's interesting to look at the progress of these parts going from basically salvage yard parts to something that looks better than new. The hood was in pretty bad shape so it is great to see how it turned out. Similar to the running boards I purchased a second hood and ended up keeping my original hood because it was easier to repair than the replacements. I also bought a reproduction hood hinge and ended up using my original hinge as well. The mounting holes in the re-production hinge do not even come close to the original holes in the hood. So that means drilling new holes and filling the old ones and that's just crazy!! So the original one is going back on.
Considering that the doors have new skins on the lower halves; you would never know it (from either side). I installed Dynamat on the insides of them and can not believe the difference in sound when you knock on them. They went from a tinny sound to a solid thud type sound. This should make a huge difference when closing the doors and when driving down the road. I will be doing the same throughout the cab.
The cab is looking good. Similar to the rear fenders, Dave made sure to take the extra effort needed to save the crease on front of the roof just above the windshield. Often you will see that people just round this out when doing the body work. Just like the subtle crease in the rear fenders, this is one of those things that I think give these trucks so much character. The back of the roof and cab for that matter came out great and similar to the other parts (like a mirror). You can see in the photos on my web page the accent stripe color which is correct for the standard Brewster green color for the 41-46 trucks.
We ran into a slight problem with the original paint we ordered from Jim Carter's in that when I called to order some more of it they were not able to produce it again because their paint supplier changed owners and they no longer had the necessary codes to match it. Mainly this was because they were not willing to give the the paint code from my original order (I'm sure because they were afraid of lost future sales of the same paint). Completely frustrating to say the least. It worked out fine because we did have enough paint left to make a spray-out card for color matching purposes. Dave then used the new "color matched" paint on the first couple coats of the green and did the last few coats in the original paint that was used for the rest of the truck.
Lesson learned here: DO NOT buy your paint from anybody but your local paint supplier or someone that is willing to give you the paint codes with your purchase. Make sure you have plenty of paint for the entire project before you start painting. Lastly, start with your cab. Everything gets built off of the cab so finishing this first will allow you to work on quite a bit while the rest of the truck is being painted. I did this backwards and this has probably set me back a few months. It also requires that you have enough storage space to store all of the completed parts until they can be installed. So far so good, nothing has been ruined from sitting in my basement, but I don't have a lot of room left in my basement..........
Thanks to Peg and John for the newest Stovebolt Home page photo! This is my two oldest daughters peeping out of the back of my cab a few years ago! This was one of their "first rides!
