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.