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Part 6: Painting the Body
TurboS10

Now that the engine will fit, it is time to get serious about doing some painting. After much debate between yellow and purple, my wife convinced me purple was the way to go, so I went with Bright Sapphire from a mid nineties Ford Splash. Below is a picture of the semi-final body fitment before I started to paint.

Some of the modifications that I do not have pictures of are removal of the gas filler door, removal of the antenna, opening of the rear wheel wells. The wheel wells had to be opened about 2 inches in the front and back to clear the tires. I did this by cutting pie slices out of the lower half of the bed around the wheel wells and reattaching the lip of the wheel well to give it a nice finished look. I don't like the unrolled edge look that a lot of race cars have.




Here is a picture of the truck getting a wash down just before I started masking for paint. This also shows the finished frame and cage pretty well. You can also see my new ebay wheels and swap meet tires. The rear wheels are 15x14 with a shallow 7 inch back space. This left the rearend wide enough to run a regular 12 inch street tire if I decide to do something different in the future.




I painted in several stages. Since I wanted the cage to be painted the body color and I knew there was no way to do it with the cab exterior, I shot the interior and firewall first.




The next stage was to paint the cab exterior and front end. This included masking off the blue and red pearl flames that I was going to attempt. This was my first shot at custom graphics. Thanks to the help I got from Hotrodders, they turned out very good. Halloweenking, Centerline, and troy-curt come to mind. I know there were others, but that was over a year ago now. Thanks guys.






Click here for Part 7: Cowl Hood


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