I managed, despite throwing my back out and getting some kind of flu (not West Nile I hope) to get the backup camera installed into DeTruck and I started painting.

The backup camera uses an X-10 B&W Nightowl camera (ran about ~$26 on ebay) and a 4" color LCD display for a Playstation One that takes A/V inputs as well (ran about ~90.) Now I have a screen mounted on the dashboard that lets me see if there is anyone or anything behind me! Big improvement.


I tried to install a backup alarm (BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, etc., ~$5 at Harbor Freight,) but DeTruck does not seem to have lights that come on when you put it in reverse! It's not that they're disabled, there just don't seem to be any. Most mysterious.

I decided to try painting one section of the truck, I selected the area on the passenger's side where the rust was really bad and I wanted to try saving some of the hand paint and gold-leaf. Here is what it was looking like up close:


I masked with masking tape and X-acto'd away all but the needed masking and a tiny buffer. Luckily a past life airbrushing helped in cutting masks. I then used a chemical wash to turn the rust into a paintable surface. After it dried I wiped and spray painted using an off-white paint. I'll do another round with a bright white to ease the off-white closer to the color of the rest of the white on the truck.


Hopefully the rust changer didn't leak under my masking and trash anything. I'll finish the white paint tonight and pull the masking tomorrow, so I'll know soon enough. If this worked, I'll do the whole truck in sections. I want to get the white looking white with no rust and the red looking red without blemish before I consider what to do next. Matching the red is hard with only spray paint to choose from. I need to start shopping around, but it's hard since they started locking up the spray paint in most stores.

--Tim
posted by Tim at 10:00 AM | Link