Thursday, July 08, 2004

So I spray painted the hood of my truck. Just the other day, I noticed at least 5 dime or smaller sized places in the center of the hood where the paint was peeling and chipping away (nearly all the way down to bare metal). The truck is about 4 years old, so I guess paint damage is normal, what do I know. Anyway, I could have bought some touch-up paint and fixed it up that way, but I decided to go the less refined way. Who'd have guessed.

Some may call it "ghetto". Others, "white trash". Still others may quip "uh oh, better get Maaco (thanks honey). But I've always liked that Landrover-out-in-the-African-bush look.

While my truck is not an Xterra, but a Frontier, my inspiration came from an Xterra owner who frequents a few boards I read. Rhombus. He's a member of the Souther Ontario Xterra Club. You can see a couple of pix of his truck below.



And in addition to seeing the hood, this is just an incredible picture:



If you hit the SOXC site, you can get copies of that last shot in various desktop sizes. Really nice.

Anyway, I decided to use Krylon Barbecue/High Temperature flat black paint for two reasons.

1) My shitty local Home Depot never has whatever piece of equipment I currently need (this includes Krylon Flat Black Spray Paint) and

2) I figured sitting in the sun, in the summer, above an engineblock all day would require a bit of heat resistance.

Of course in my Sierra Nevada Pale Ale fueled zeal to get the job done, I drove home from work, to the afore mentioned shitty local HD store and back home and immediately began taping and sanding under the bring late afternoon sun. Didn't occur to me that the hood would be about 200 degrees and every pass of spraypaint would dry instantly (and unevenly). Hell, most of the paint coming out of the can turned to powder before it even hit the hood. And I was spraying from 3-4" away. So anyway, the finished product is not quite as nice as I had envisioned. But have no fear...it's still a work in progress. I think this weekend may see me take sandpaper to it again (in the shade this time...and without driving it first), then perhaps hit it with a few coats of Krylon Flat Black Spray Paint. That is, if I can find it in the shitty HD store the next town over.