Project: Dually Conversion on the Pickup—Fenders sanded and ready for primer and paint

Well, small update today . I am thankful to God for putting as good a neighbors as I have right now at the RV park in site 4.

So, today, I went about sanding the fenders. I started out working on the passenger side fender using what I had available for sanding tools, a foam hand sanding block and a package of pre-cut pieces of 60 Grit sand paper.

Lemme tell you what, hand sanding down glass bondo sucks.

I ate through most of my sand paper hand sanding the passenger side fender and it was looking like I wasn’t going to get much further today.

As I was sitting in the screen room patio giving my wrists a rest, my neighbors came home from their daily outing. We exchanged friendly greetings and waylaid them with the woes of my undertaking.

A few minutes later, as I was adding a fresh coat of 40% deet bug repellent to the interesting cake of fiberglass dust, dirt, sweat, sun block and the last coating of deet, my neighbor came back out and dug around in his motorhomes storage compartments until he produced a Dewalt oscillating sander and an extra package of 3M “Sandblaster” 60 grit sand paper.

With many thanks for the loan, I finished sanding both fenders down in under an hour and a half, doing both the coarse and fine sanding the glass surface needed to ready it for primer and paint.

The fenders are now a nice even surface with only the mismatched colors of the bondo-glass and the old fiberglass fenders showing where the fenders had been worked, I still haven’t worked out what the devil the original paint color was before somebody repainted that poor old donor truck purple.

Providing the weather holds out tomorrow, it’s been threatening to rain all day today, I will have the fenders primed, and ready for their color coat of paint (which will have to wait another day till the next unemployment check shows up so I can buy the can of white rustoleum I need and some timber to do another beefing-up project to the camper’s tub (I already have a can of Rustoleum Automotive primer and the clear coat, just no regular white).

Once the fenders are painted, I can lay down a nice bead of sealant along the edge of the fender and the truck bed, the fenders are a perfect contour match, but not water tight.

I will need to wait till I can head back down south to visit family with the truck to spray on the rubber undercoater (Also made by Rustoleum) to the underside of the fenders and the truck bed, that and I want to get the marker lights wired in and the wires epoxied in place before I coat everything in undercoater.

Some have asked about her first trip. Sadly, I doubt she’ll be on the road with the camper aboard until September at the earliest, possibly October for the 2011 Fall Colors Rally.

Project: Dually Conversion on the Pickup—Swing Out Brackets on the Camper & Fenders bondo-ed

Well, its been a little over a month since I’ve been able to make any headway on my dually conversion project.

When I left off, the fenders had just been bolted on and the truck was driven home after a couple test drives to confirm that the brake shoes in the rear were at the exactly correct position.

Since then, the truck really hasn’t moved other than to be moved out of the way to mow the grass.

Now, that has changed .

Over the last couple days, I finished a couple tasks on this project.

First, I got some old Hi-Jacker swing out brackets off of craigslist for $100. Took them over to Terry’s, had him beef up them up a bit, painted them white and then bolted them on the camper.

Discovered that the stock swing out brackets only gave me 3/4” between the jack and the dually fender to load and unload (Truck is 94" wide, Camper with the stock swing-out brackets was 95 1/2" between the jacks). I’d much rather not have to perform a NASA grade maneuver every time I go to load, so a few weeks later, over the fourth of July weekend to be exact, I returned down south and had Terry cut me two 3” wide x 14”tall x 3/16” thick hunks of plate steel, which I drilled, painted and then bolted onto the swing out brackets and onto which I bolted the jacks.

I now have an 1 1/2” of additional clearance on each side to squeeze my truck through. I’ll still need to watch, but the tolerances are nowhere near as tight .

Now, all I need to do is call Jay over at Torklift and get the parts I need to make those Wobbl-stopprs hinged at the jack mount point, and I should be able to slide under the camper as smooth as greased lightning .

The next thing I did was used the majority of a can of Bondo-Glass to fill in any gaps and imperfections in the fenders so that they are now perfectly matched to the truck’s body. The bondo was still tacky when I left to write this blog entry, so I’ll wait till tomorrow before attempting to sand the fiberglass down smooth.

I also took this full truck view picture as I realized there wasn’t really a good set back view of the truck with the fenders installed.

Please forgive the smudge in the center of the lense, had no clue it was there until I went to upload the pictures!