I finished up the prep work on the frame today. I washed the frame with soap and water, then sanded it with 400 grit, then washed it again to remove the sanding dust. I then degreased the frame with POR-15 “Marine Clean”, etched the metal with POR-15 “Metal Prep”, and dried everything and blew the crevices out with compressed air.

Tomorrow I’ll do all of the masking work and get the spraygun all cleaned up and flushed with solvent. I’m going to do all of the painting on Sunday.

The first thing I need to do on the mystery project involves taking this pile of parts…

…and turning it into a pair of kingpins like in this model:

Hopefully I get a bit of time to start working on this between coats of paint this weekend. The parts in the first picture are a 1.250″ 1018 steel rod, a .625″ A2 tool steel rod, four .625″ ID 841 bronze flanged sleeve bearings, and four .625″ ID 841 bronze thrust bearings.

I’m all set to paint the frame this weekend. I’m planning on getting all the cleaning, prep work and masking taken care of tomorrow. I’ll tackle laying the POR-15 and primer down on Saturday. The topcoat will be taken care of the following weekend since everything else needs to cure for at least 4 days first.

I have no excuse for not updating this site aside from being lazy. There’s been some progress on the truck, but it’s just a bunch of little things. The house and kids have been getting a bunch of my attention as well.

As far as the house goes, I’ve been finishing up some remodelling work that I’ve been meaning to get around to. I’ve eliminated my old electrical panel that was in the dining room and put a new 100 amp panel in the garage. The new panel and conduit back to the main panel is all finished. All that remains there is to pull the feed, then I can run new circuits in the garage as their needed. The motivation for the new garage subpanel is to provide power for a new welder that I picked up. I got a MIller Synchrowave 200 TIG welder. I really enjoyed learning the basics of TIG welding in the welding class I took last year, and there are quite a few things I need to do on my truck that need TIG welding. A few of the larger welding projects on my truck that I’ll be using this machine for are building a new intercooler, finishing the intake manifold work that I posted on previously, and building a roll cage. Other things I’ve been doing on the house include some new kitchen lighting, removing a wall in the garage, and finishing up the trim work in the dining room. I’m hoping to get the dining room all finished up and painted in the next month or so.

On the truck, there have just been a number of small things that I’ve done since I last posted. I finally received the steering rack crossmember, so I worked on fitting that to the frame, which required some drilling and grinding. I pulled everything back off of the front end to get ready to finally paint the frame. I’m going to be painting the frame with two coats of POR-15, then top-coating that with some satin black chassis paint. I’ve been holding off on doing this painting work because I need to have a few solid days to do successive coats in the re-coat window. Since this coming weekend is a 3 day weekend due to the 4th of July, I’m going to do the painting of the POR-15 then. The POR-15 needs to cure for 4 days before being applying the topcoat, so I’ll spray the topcoat the following weekend. Once the paint work is done, I can start putting the suspension back together and bending up new brake lines. It’s about time things start coming back together instead of being taken apart!

There’s another little project that Knute and I are starting to work on, which will remain a mystery for now. I’ll start posting up some pictures of it’s progress soon.

On Sunday, I put my lower intake manifold on the operating table. I’m basically expanding the volume of the plenum by sectioning the manifold. I’m hoping to drop the floor by about 1 1/2″. This will increase the volume as well as give me more room for a bigger intercooler. More details on this later, but here are some pics.