How To: C15a Wire-3 restoration

[Peter Duggan]

Jordan,

That's not pitting, it's patina. Great job on rebuilding the body.

Peter

[Bob Carriere]

Hi Jordan

Following your progress with much interest.

Have you tried using the POR Blue Tie Coat..... it is thick, sandable and self leveling. On a flat surface like your floor you should be able to recover a lot of the pits..... may need some light block sanding between two coats just to remove the high spots.

Remember that the worst color for showing uneven surface is "GLOSSY BLACK" paint and the best paint to hide blemishes is flat OD green.

Good luck.

[Jordan Baker]

Yes Peter it is patina for sure. I left a bullet hole in the one wheel well. Figured that was some good patina.

Ill be painting on the tiecoat primer once I get the sides all welded on. So I can do some sanding.

[Jordan Baker]

Todays small amount of progress. I am sure glad I picked up one of the welding extension cables from Princess Auto last fall. Now I can easily reach everything I need from the shop.

Got one of the four channel end caps welded in. I also welded back in one of the hangers for the 1gal oil can holder. When we recovered this box from the woods I had to cut this hanger as I wasn't able to get to the bolts holding the bracket on. Yes I could have just welded in a brand new piece of channel, but other then my two cuts there wasn't anything wrong with it.

[Jordan Baker]

Spent most of the day Friday working on the box. The two wheel wells needed some work done to them. Two end panels had suffered from some metal rotting. New pieces were cut and the old ones were cut out. I was able to re-use three of the loops that are welded on these panels. The fourth one was made.

Saturday was spent going to Cleveland to check out the MVPA National convention. Had a great time.

Today's plan was to get the new angle iron sections welded onto the floor and also get the front panel tacked in. I did manage to get this done even with the weather not cooperating. Setting up three times and bringing my tools and welder back inside three times was a bit of a pain.

[Jordan Baker]

Fitted on the two sides today. I discovered I had some issues with the wheel wells dropping a bit when the original sides were cut off. This left me with a bit of a gap to lclose. I ended up using a floor jack and ratchet strap. Using the strap to hold the jack tight to the box frame I then jacked it up with a block of wood. This pressed the wheel well in tight to the side panel and I could get some good tac welds in.

[Jordan Baker]

Not much to update. Almost done all of the welding on the box. The only bit left is to weld the bottom edge of the front panel to the box floor/frame.

One nice accessory that I recently came into was the components for the buzzer located in the cab. This came from a friends CMP. He wasn't wanting to do a wireless truck and had no need for it. Now it lives on in my truck.