It's been far too long since I've posted anything on this. I've been really busy trying to finish off my basement in my house. I honestly haven't done a whole lot to the truck. I still have to paint the hood and fix a few other things but I did finally get the wood for my bed installed.
I'm pretty happy with it but I did have a lot of problems when I cleared the wood originally. I found out the hard way that if you use automotive clear on wood DO NOT CLEAR THE BOTTOM FIRST!
I thought that by clearing the bottom sides first then I wouldn't have to worry about scratching the tops of the boards once I turned the boards over to finish the tops. It seem logical at the time... But...
The first coat I did on the bottom side looked amazing and I let it dry for about a day and flipped the boards over to clear the top sides... That's when the problems began...
The first coat of clear looked outstanding at first... I cleaned up everything and went into the house to eat lunch and went back out into the garage about an hour later and every board looked like a kid had blew bubbles all over the tops of the boards.
I've never seen anything like it before... I haven't cleared a lot of wood before but I have done it on small plaques when I was in the military. I wasn't sure what caused this. I tried looking up info online but I didn't find much.
Basically I sanded the tops smooth again and re cleared everything again. The same thing happened again... Everything looked fine for about a 15-20 mins then the bubbles started popping up everywhere. I was beyond frustrated because automotive clear is not cheap.
I let everything dry again and then I had a thought "maybe by clearing the bottoms first, possibly the wood was trapping air/moisture in the wood?"
Could it be that by cleared the tops after the bottom sides that it was causing the clear to pull out whatever was trapped in the wood once the clear started to dry?
Obviously I'm no expert so I could be completely wrong but it seemed to make some sort of sense because everything else was obviously not working...
My solution was to then sand off most of the clear on the bottoms of the boards to open the pores in the wood to hopefully prevent the bubbles again. I also sanded the tops again as smooth as I could get them. Then I cleared the tops again...
FINALLY! They turned out pretty decent with no bubbles. I wish they would have looked as nice as the first time I cleared them before the bubble problem but they look pretty nice.
Once the tops dried for about two days I turned them over and sprayed a light coat on the bottom to protect the bottom side.
The strange thing is I really expected the bottoms to bubble up but they didn't???
I'm not sure why, maybe by cleared the wood so many times it had sealed everything well enough that it didn't cause the same problem? I don't know, I can't explain it.... All I know is they looked pretty good and I was sick of sanding and I didn't really care anymore... Haha!
Hopefully this experience can help someone else if they read it. Sorry, I know that was long. Anywho here are the picture of bed. I still have to paint the hood and fix a few things but I did finally get this part finished. Oh, and I also added another air compressor because one just wasn't filling the tank fast enough.
