One of the biggest trends picking up steam over the past few years is the retro style. With an increase in Rat-styled vehicles, the retro look has carried over to trucks. Although the style can be achieved by modifications all throughout a vehicle, the biggest way to show it is with paint. Heavy flake, scallops, traditional flames, and pinstriping are some of the many elements that can be used to create a retro-like paintjob.
For our Chevy S-10, it had already undergone a few retro mods like a custom tailgate, frenched-in vintage taillights, and a hood louvered by Sir Michaels. With these body modifications in raw steel, they were considered unfinished ideas. Because we needed a good paintjob to transition these mods to the factory lines of our S-10, we turned to Kustom Werx of Conroe, Texas. The Kustom Werx crew has impressed everyone in the scene by consistently bringing out cleanly painted vehicles to every show they attend.
Seeing how their work could get the attention of many people at the shows, we called the crew to figure out how they could top off our truck. While talking to owner Cory Scott, we threw out several ideas, and he suggested going wild with nothing less than crazy "bass boat" flake. And with Pat Maxwell doing work out of his shop, our need for old-school graphics would be taken care of. Even though our truck would have to travel more than 1,500 miles to get paint, we knew it would be finished right.
The only thing left to do was discuss our color scheme. We liked the factory pewter color of our truck and decided to add major flake to it. Even though it was hard to find a color that would work for the graphics, we did some homework and figured that a purple would work. Since Kustom Werx uses PPG paints, the crew suggested the use of their materials to paint our truck, since they are high-quality and do not require excessive coatings. We had already seen a purple we liked and were able to have Jeff Jones of Brault Auto Paint in Houston custom-mix a batch for us. With all of the paints figured out, it was time to get spray-happy.
The Supplies
As we stated before, PPG has high-quality products and makes everything we needed for our retro paintjob. Shown here are the wax and grease remover, PN DX330, high solids hardener, PN DCX61, reducer, PN DT885, clearcoat, PN DCU2021, Pewter basecoat, PN DBC5377, Micro Sequin Flakes, PN DX-85, and custom Deep Purple, mixed by Jeff Jones at Brault Auto Paint & Supply of Houston.