[landarts]

Also had a little side project for my friend Travis that is building an 68 service bed truck that he is getting ready to sell and he also the one installing my 350 V8 I built into the Teal colored K10. When I was out at is property dropping off the motor and box of parts to go on the truck we got to talking about the progress on his 68 serve bed truck project. The truck has a really cool medium blue color that has oxidized and some patina that he is going to keep original. He had a original dash pad that he pulled off to do some repair work in the interior and asked me if I knew of a way to fix the four small defects/holes in the dash. I said yes and I happened to have the color in SEM you need so I took on the small project to help him out moving the ball forward on his project.

When I got home I scrubbed it down a few times with a couple of different products and addressed the areas that were punctured or open with some sand paper to create so bite for filling. I used some JB weld epoxy that is made for plastics, vinyl, and a few other substrates. It is a 5 minute cure epoxy so I knew in my garage at about 65 to 68 degrees it will give me a little more pot time before it gets sticky. Knowing that I did a test sample on an old dash pad piece that was trashed I had in the shop. The idea I had was to hit the epoxy with a crunched up piece of Saran wrap just when the epoxy is getting tacky but not 100% hardened. The test sample worked out great and I decided to move on to the dash pad for Travis.

I taped off the areas that needed epoxy and left just enough revealed to do the repairs. Mixed up the epoxy and added a little West Systems colloidal silica for filler to the epoxy to get to a harder peanut butter consistency. Smoothed it on and when it got tacky pressed in the Saran wrap for texture. After that I took it in the house to cure for a couple of days. When it was all good I knocked down those areas with a little wet and dry paper, wiped it down with wax and grease remover and shot a coat of adhesion promotor to get it ready to except the SEM blue color. After a couple of coats had flashed off I could see the areas that I repaired were not taking the SEM as the rest of the pad was so I did a couple of spritz with SEM texture spray then two more coats and that did the trick.

I had also recommended a shop truck logo to go with the patina so I did a mock up in Photoshop of his door while he had off to do rocker repairs. If we go with this I will cut a stencil with my vinyl plotter and hand paint on with thinned down one shot paint and treat for patina look.

Pict 1,2 shows where a few of the holes were on the pad in white filler
Pict 3 shows after the last coats were applied
Pict 4,5 shows the door from the truck and the mockup