Part One: Prep It!
1. Certain pieces like the door handles were shaved, and then all of the sheetmetal was worked smoothed with body filler. Afterward, the inside of the cab was taped off, and the frame was covered in plastic. | 
2. To prep everything for paint, all of the body pieces were wiped with wax and grease remover to make sure that they were free of contaminants. Then, the whole truck got a coating of PPG sealer, PN NCP271. | 
Part Two: Paint And Flake It!
1. Now ready for our Pewter basecoat, we poured 13 ounces of it into this container. It was then followed by 13 ounces of reducer and stirred to complete the 1:1 ratio. |
2. Normally, any vehicle that Kustom Werx does a full paintjob on will have the doors removed, so the cab and doors can be completely painted. In our case, the Pewter easily flops in various shades, and all of the body panels needed to be painted together to prevent a blotchy-looking paintjob. Keeping the doors attached made it harder to spray the doorjambs, but James was able to ease his gun in this area to apply two coats of paint. Then, the back of the cab and the front of the bed were also coated. | 
3. The next step of the paint process includes adding our gold flake. The goal was to add flake on top of the Pewter paint without changing its color. Since Pewter has a gold-like quality, we figured that it would get the retro shine we wanted to achieve with this factory color. To create the combination to be sprayed, 13 ounces of DMD649 clearcoat was poured into a container, followed by a top coating of flake and 13 ounces DBX1689 basecoat converter. The mixture was then stirred and poured in the Sata Jet 2000 spray gun's filler. |  |
4. Since this smaller flake was blended with clear, it was simply sprayed on just like our basecoat without using any special spray guns. All of the areas previously covered in our basecoats were sprayed twice with the flake mixture. | 
5. After waiting approximately one hour, the doors were closed, and the bed was placed on the frame with the help of some extra hands. | 
6. With all of the body panels together, the truck was sprayed in two coats of basecoat and two coats of our flake mixture. Because all of the flat body panels were painted together, it ensured that the paint would match on all of the pieces. After the paint went on, the DBC500 mid-clear with 1:1 mixture of reducer was sprayed on to protect our paint from the sticky tape that would be used for the graphics. |
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7. We could only spray so much at one time in the paint booth, so the mirrors, dash panel, front bumper, wiper cowl, tonneau cover, and tailgate were painted separately. If the color of our paint mixture shifted any small bit, no one would be able to tell the difference on these pieces because they have different facets than the body. | |