Driving away from purchasing his coach, JD got sideswiped by someone on their cell phone! Of course insurance paid to fix that
Since the paint had some age and being dated with all those stripes AND trying to match the “patina” of the older paint, the decision was made to repaint the coach. JD wasn’t much into that color anyway!
First came mechanicals, fuel tanks and pulling of stuff that “looked good idea at the time” like this second (double) rear brake vacuum brake booster
Hey, see if you can get THAT fixed on the road! JD decided to keep the Electromotive Direct Port high end sequential fuel injection system. Being a military helicopter mechanic I know he’ll enjoy playing with it.
Including the one I had in Larry, I installed something like 6 of these systems. Very cool and very technical. The FiTech fits more our customers needs but this… hey JD will never get bored driving…. torque charts and everything on the fly no less!
Anyway, we got most of the mechnicals done. Having 16.5″ aluminum rims and an original air bag system, we are installing that stuff after the paint work to keep overspray off his new 17″ rims and quad bag system From there it went back to paint for it’s facelift.
A full exterior restoration, A bite surface was found, blocked smooth then the sealing primer gave us the ready to paint surface we needed.
Now came the paint layout. JD sought help in his quest for the perfect design from Byron S.. A graphics designer, GMC owner and all around deep thinking guy….. came up with his rendition of what JD wanted.
OK, there are 2 levels of paint layout…. designs that can be done by mere mortal painters and those that take Picasso.
Here is a “mere mortal” layout .Kinda cool and here is an artist layout
which BTW is up for sale right now …….. it’s featured on our web site on the gallery page under “Bling-bling”. We did both but had to bring in my go-to layout guru for Bling-bling!
Anyway one needs the hand of a true artist… the layout of the Bling-bling pic was outstanding and true professional design things like this…. it TAKES folks like that to come up with it… and you must pay for that. Byron is that kinda designer but he went easy on us….. there was only one line that caused me a 3 dimensional consideration headache. Here it is
On the surface it looks pretty simple ahhhh…. but looking deeper that lower forward “raccoon” line is a freehand arc! The slanted raccoon uprights want to have a rounded look where the black carries on behind the uprights front to back! And that single red line has no other pinstripes to hade any imperfections…….. Oh boy! Thanks for the challenge there Byron, hey I love you too. So lets get-r-done, a week of thinking and 2 false starts and we got the arc and the raccoon layout without tapping Walter…. fewwwwwwww!.
Doing it differently I think we still got the 3d look on the uprights too
That vertical curve look comes from the radius of the curved side of the coach! Red, being the smallest color went on first the then layout and bag of the black then silver then off to the booth for the clear.
Add in a fair amount of blood, sweat and tears and we have back a high solids clear coated Byron design and I think the uprights work too. 48 hours of curing and the wet sand and buff out begins
Testing the finish to see our depth, this black section is wet sanded then buffed out with this new buff out process … just came out.
Here Junior (the buffer driver) and I are seen in the reflection of that black finished area
Brother now that’s a deep, clear color! Now it’s grind-time, Junior upper shoulders are gonna be sore after this! Stay tuned for more pics….
Oh yeah, We worked up a new video on patreon about how the air ride system works….. how to play with the buttons! Go take a look…. go to:
www.patreon.com
Shadowed at the top of the page put in “Motorhome Rehab Ranch”. It’s in there…….. see ya tomorrow……