Happy New Year to you all. Hope you’ve all recovered from the New year celebrations, it’s been a strange year, unfortunately it looks like it will continue for some time yet.
It’s been a while since I last posted here mainly due to having a heavy workload after Lockdown 1, I’ve managed to get a few more jobs done on the van during what little spare time I’ve had. I seem to have got the sequences all arse about face as the last job I had done was to have the exterior partially repainted.
Before preparing the van for the paintshop I had a couple of jobs to do, one was fitting a pair of Daytime Running Lights (DRL’s), these are a safety item fitted to all new cars and they come on with the engine running , these aftermarket ones also dim when the headlights are switched on so as to not dazzle other drivers. I had seen a friend fit the same ones into his motorhome and thought it would be a good addition to the van.
Next on the list was to sort the alloy wheels out as they were starting to look a bit scruffy, although not actually damaged at all the alloy was starting to corrode, after looking at what was involved with getting them painted myself I decided to get a local bodyshop to refurbish them, I wasn’t too happy with what it was going to cost but thought they would certainly look better than what I could achieve. I was right, when I went to collect them after they had been repainted I couldn’t believe they were the same wheels, the finish on them was incredible, I had gone for Anthracite as the colour and what a really deep shine they had got, there was no sign of the corrosion that was there before hand.
After fitting the wheels it really showed up how bad the body work was getting so it was decided to repair the rust spots and respray the lower part of the van in Anthracite to match the wheels, but this would be done with “Raptor Liner” truck bed liner paint, its a tough spray on liner usually used for the bed of a pick-up. It’s possible to buy the Raptor paint and add a tint of the colour you want so that it’s totally customisable.
The first thing to do was strip off the lower trim panels and grind out the rust spots, these were then treated with Jenolite on the bare metal, then fillered and primer applied. I had bought all the gear to spray it myself and after watching a couple of Youtube video’s I was confident it would be OK, the worst part was masking off the rest of the van to avoid overspray, think I overdid that part !!
Once the Raptor liner had cured it was time to sort out the main panels which would be remaining silver, as winter was drawing in and with no workshop that had any heat in it for curing the paint I got the bodyshop that did the wheels to do the painting, not a cheap option but they once again did a great job and I got the van back within a week, I am really pleased with the finished results and there was no way I could have got such a good finish myself.
Thats about it for now, there’s still a few small jobs to do but mainly I’m just waiting for the country to get back to normal, hopefully before June so that I can once again get away to sunnier climes for a while.
Stay safe and Happy New Year to you all..
Delscampertour 