The Update is Here.

 A lot of time has gone by since the last update, and want to assure everyone that things are still moving along on the project. The body work is done on the box and is waiting for it first coat of primer. Will get blocked and then a second coat of primer and blocked before paint. Hoping to have it back from paint in June.  

 Okay we decided to go a different route on the pizza truck no just kidding. Since the last update I found this little gem and couldn't pass it up. This one was like my first car that I owned as a kid and have wanted one to drive around town for fun. My kids told me that I was going through my mid life crisis and then they informed me no that can't be, because I was already passed that stage.They sure know how to hurt a guy. I don't care it sure fun to drive.

 This is one of the first emblems for the side of the box. This is after I sanded and polished the out side perimeter. Before I started it had the same tooling marks as the inside of the sign.This was my first step of many before the process was finished.

  

 Here is a closer look at what the tooling marks looked like. I wanted the center of the sign to have a cast look. After trying different methods sand blasting was the best choice. I used a very aggressive grit to achieve the look I was looking for. Even with the aggressive sand blasting I still had to sand the inside of the sign before I sand blasted so that tooling marks disappeared.

   

This was my first run at it, but decided that I wanted a heaver texture. I taped it back up and shot it one more time with 36 grit media. 

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 Taping off the sign to get ready for polishing the tops of the letters. After taping I blocked sanded the tops of the letters to get a nice flat edge. Then polished the edge.

 Still working on the tops of the letters.

 Before I unmasked the work.

 Tops Polished up nicely. 

 The inside of the Dough Boy and Pizza will be painted the colors of the truck with the tops of the letting polished. So now I need to re-mask for paint. Almost done. No wait I still have one more to do(UGH). Second one should go better I learned a lot on the first one.

It's mid December and Chris and I are on the way to Idaho to meet a potential upholstery shop for the truck. We have been searching for a upholstery shop since day one but have had no luck. I was following a lot of shops on instagram, but most of the ones I liked where back east. Then one day on the Hog Ring they posted some pictures of some work done by Stitchwurx. So I went and looked at his instagram page and liked what I saw, and the bonus was he was close to us. (Well six hours) I called him up and talked about the project and sent him some pictures. While talking to him he seemed to be very interested and excited about the project and I had a good feeling about how are conversation went. So we made the plan to meet.

  

 So the two weeks before are trip the weather was beautiful and of course the day of the trip this is what we got.  The good thing was it started while we were over half way there. By the time we reached Idaho we had six inches of snow. We made it to Rick's shop with no problems and had a great meeting with him. He showed us around the shop and the current project that he was working on. We talked about two hours and by the time we were done we knew that we found the right guy. He had a opening in March and we took the spot. We left and got to run in snow for the first three hour and a couple of uhh I better slow down. We made it home safely and was a great trip.

 On the way home from are trip to Idaho Chris and I looked at each and said crap we need to get busy putting the cab together. We only have two months to get it done. The next week we were picking up the cab from Silver Creek Auto Body. The cab has been ready for months and Bob was nice enough to store it for us. Ready for the move back to Chris shop.  

 First step is for the insulation of the sound skins. The truck was also sprayed with a sound deadening paint on the inside. 

  

 It's amazing what this stuff does to quite things down. 

 The nice thing is that I cleaned up about four shelves at home. The bad part is now it's out on four tables plus the floor.

 Half of a table is just screws. After almost two years where do they all go?

 I should have taken a lot more pictures, I got so caught up on getting things back together that there wasn't much time for pictures. As you can see we have the front glass and windows in. We took the glass to some glass shop but no one would touch them. So that left Chris and I to installed the glass in the frames. After getting the right setting tape things went fairly easy. Installed the A/C unit, vent doors and motors, wiper motors, and some of the wiring.

 The cab has to be completely wired before it goes to Stitchwurx for the upholstery. To make this happen we used a plug-n-play type setup. We used a 30 pin connector between the firewall to connect the cab to the box of the truck. 

 Front glass installed. The glass has a slight tint to it and looks real good with the colors of the truck.

 Put the dash together on bench to make it a little easy for assembly.

 When designing the dash we tried to keep it period correct. We have push button start  with a light switch and heater controls. The rest of the switches are under the dash out of sight.

 Radio is hidden in the glove box.

 Still need to install glove box door.

View of the wiring from behind the dash. Trust me I do have a note book full of wiring diagrams and notes and sometimes that even confusing.  

  

 Here's the 30 pin connector that we used. Still has more wires to be installed. We also have a two inch grommet with about 20 wires going through the firewall also.

Some of these wires go to the plug and some out the two inch grommet and some to the switch panel. I have it all under control I think.

The under dash switch panel. At the last minute we decided to add the courtesy light to the panel.

 More piece coming together.

 The original vent screen for the side vents

 This is how Rick  from Stitchwurx got the truck. Time for him to work his magic.

Getting ready for the trip to Idaho. It fit real nice in the toy hauler.

 This setup worked really nice and we were able to stay at a RV park just minutes away from Rick's place. We planned on staying in Idaho for a couple days to help Rick with some of the interior disassembly and go over some of plans for the interior.

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 Some sample piece Rick worked on just for kicks. If any of you are Instagram users you can follow Rick at Stitchwurx. He posts a lot of his work there and you can follow the progress of the truck.

 This is how I gave Rick the back panel that goes behind the seat. He said it was a good starting point for him and was going to take it to the next level. It was a one piece unit that was heavy and hard to get in and out of the truck. Rick took it and made it two piece so that the amp stuff would stay in the truck and that the cover would attach to that.

 When he said next level I think it's more like three or four.

 In the truck and finishing up on the wiring. Next up is to start to work on the panel that goes over this part. 

 You can watch this video that Rick posted with the panel lit up on his Instagram page.

It's pretty amazing.

So we have the grill back also. you can see a video of it at mercury_chris on Instagram also. It's also pretty amazing. Well that's where we are as of today. Not much will happen till we get the box back from paint. Plan on working on the other sign for the truck and doing some polish work. Till next time, hopefully soon!!

Summer Progress

Not a lot of exciting things happening on the truck so far this summer. Well I should say not exciting in the fabrication aspect of the project anyway. We have been working on all the loose end stuff to get it ready for the trip to the body shop. The final piece of the exterior is to finish up the service window. We have the door opening tact in and will have to wait till the box get painted to finish up the final opening. This is so we can remove the siding and get the paint under the lip that the siding butts up to. The interior of the box will also wait till after paint so that the panel could be body worked from both sides. Been working on the logo that will be on the side of the polished portion of the box. It will be about 25"x 84" when done and be machined out of aluminium. Chris finished up the brackets for the propane tanks and the siding to complete the back area of the truck. Chris has been working on a vintage trailer for a customer and when finished we will start to work on some of the assembly of the cab and get it ready for some of the upholstery work. We're hoping to have the box back from paint by the end of the year so we can get started on putting things together. So unfortunately you won't see many post till then. I will try and keep everyone up to date on the progress.

    

The first time the box has seen daylight. Getting ready to load the beast on the trailer.

It was great to see the box from a different perspective and to take it all in.

Well this was the last shot I took before we loaded it on to the trailer. I planed on taking more but I got a little stressed when loading the truck and taking pictures was now not my top priority. We had a 24' 14000lb trailer with a hydraulic tilt bed thinking we had plenty of trailer. We could have used about 3' more and things would have been a lot less stressful. We had two winches to pull the truck up on the bed of the trailer which work great till we started to lower the tilt bed down. When you see the front of the bed go down and the back is still about only two inches off the ground you start to panic a little. Of course we borrowed the trailer from a good friend and I'm thinking we are totally bending his bed frame in two. We facetime him to see if we should continue and he said keep going it will be fine. It worked, but we had no tongue weight on the trailer. After about two hours of working on getting more weight up front and making sure we where safe to make the 35 mile journey we headed out. The good news is that we stop at the scales to get a starting weight before we started, then we stop and weighed the load. The truck weigh in at 8900lbs. We took it real slow and only had one of those I should slow down feeling. We started to load the truck around 10 and where unloaded at the body shop at 5. Over all it was a good day with no unforeseen incidences and the best part the body work and paint have started.

Okay maybe we have done some exciting things this summer. This is the start of the logo that was routed out of a 3/8 sheet of aluminum. Before this we had made test pieces at a smaller scale to work out any changes that needed to be made to the logo. 

The logo will be 25" x 84" and will go on the flat polished aluminum on the box.

The guys at Meticulous Detail Manufacturing invited us over to see the project get started. It was incredible to see how the process worked to get to the finished part. 

  The chips were flying.

Chris holding up the first logo that was unfortunately not a usable part. Jesse at MDM was gracious enough to let us have the part to do some experimenting on.  Some of it will be painted, sandblasted, and polished. We also made a couple of change to the part that we thought needed to be addressed for the next run. Jesse has work very hard to make this project become a reality. When things haven't been right he has made sure to make them right. If your looking for some custom work that you need done I would highly recommend the guys at MDM in Portland.

       

Tom over at Silvercreek Auto Body has been working hard on getting the box flat and ready for paint.

A lot of  hammering and dolly work on the top panels to get it ready for the skim coat that has been put down.

Starting to work his way down the the sides.

It's coming a long nicely. Still a lot of work to be done. Sanding, blocking, sanding, blocking, you get the picture. I must say though that Tom is knocking it out of the park. That's all I have for now. Will try to keep everyone in the loop. 

Last Touches on the Cargo Doors

Been Working on the last touches on the cargo doors. All the cargo doors have shaved door handles which took a lot more engineering then we where expecting. But in the end it was well worth the effort. The power that we needed to power the door solenoids run through these contacts.

It took us a couple of tries to find the right door popper that would work. The small doors we where able to use one, but it took two for the bigger ones.

Here you can see the location of the contacts and the popper in the top of door.

Used Spal 8lb door lock actuators to release the door latch and made the bracket to hold it in place. Again we tried different actuators and this one seamed to be well built and pulled harder then the more expensive one that we tried. 

   

It's a straight pull to engage the the latch which I think helps out a lot on the success of the actuator.

We also made a emergency latch so that if we had any failures we could still get the doors open. We still plan on making the release lever more attractive. 

To some of you observant followers you will notice that we had to change are design on the latching plate that holds the striker. The first one didn't get the pin out far enough to engage the latch.

We used 20lb gas shocks on the small doors and 40lb for the large ones. This is what Chis and I stressed out most of about the making of the doors. How many pounds will it take to open and hold the doors up, where do we place them, and how long of a shock do we need? In the end it all worked out and ended up not being the hardest part of building the doors.

Door gaps are all done and ready for a little fine tuning on the body work side.

The last touch was to add the back panels to the doors.

Hope this works. a little video of one of the doors in action.

Pulled down the 16' panel to give the bottom edge a beveled to match the siding.

We made three passes with the router so that we didn't have to take all the material off at once. This was after the second pass was made.

Getting ready for the last past.

Chris used a piece of tubing for a guide to run the router down the piece of material. It took a very steady hand and some smooth foot work to get a nice even cut on the 16' panel.

This is what it looked like before we started.

The finished part back on the truck.

The part after sanding and a first cut on the polisher.

We are very happy to have this part done and out of the way. The part came out even and consistent in the 16'. Next up will be to start the polishing process on the rest of the panel.