Project cap acquired!

Hey, that rack does look better! (As long as you didn't need the added length.) Stay motivated, set a goal. Show us when you get the solar panel mounted, ok?

 

It's looking like there will be two panels eventually - the packable one, and the one I want to permanently attach to the roof. I'm still pondering the "permanent" mounted one. I've been thinking about essentially drawer-mounting the permanent panel to the underside of the roof rack so I can pull it out to get sun on it when camped without having to take everything off the roof of the cap. The pull-out for the panel on the underside would also have room to mount a tarp to use as a truckside canopy.

I'll post some sketches hopefully soon.

 

Every man should have McMaster Carr bookmarked on their computer. Catalog is over 4,000 pages which they do not print. You can get a liver from them...and a complete gas station with female attendants. Amazon is not the total have all. Yet. LOL
Zim
https://www.mcmaster.com/window-weatherstripping/

 

Don't forget https://www.Grainger.com and https://www.mouser.com/ too, prices and delivery options sometimes work out better depending on what and where.

 

Here we go... stripped and ready to start the ugly work.

The plan is to replace all the glass with 3/8 plexi, one piece on the sides and front glued up with a urethane - I straight up never used the sliders, so we can cut a lot.of weight, complexity (5000 screws, trim, gaskets, etc), and leak paths by doing it this way.

The old third eye hole will be glassed over and a set of vintage armored side markers will be put in their place, a set of red/brake and yellow/hazards across the top.

After I finish cleaning and prepping, the cap will be a test run for Durabak 18 smooth finish, which the whole truck will eventually get if this goes well.

I'm going to keep the rack bars, but probably come up with as low profile of a mount for them as I can cook up, using the existing holes - probably a couple pieces of extrusion that will hold the same Tnuts as the rack bars take.

 

You're replacing 1/8" glass with 3/8" plexi? That's going to weigh a LOT more. If you are going plastic for the windows, I would get polycarbonate not acrylic (plexi is just a brand name). The plastic windows will scratch easily as well. If I were you and you have the option, I would stick to using a solid piece of glass. You can get something like this https://amzn.to/4e5atoe to use for a solid piece and eliminate all the aluminum framing. Those are for 1/4" glass, but you can probably find some for different thicknesses.

 

I'll have to take a look at weights and chemistries - re: scratches, I'm going to put a film on them (3M makes a good scratch film and I can get it relatively cheaply), and I hadn't actually decided on a material. I was using "plexi" (incorrectly) as a nonspecific generic. I'm.going to talk to my window guy and see what he says. He replaces a lot of glass for farm/work trucks, tractors, bed setups, etcetera with various kinds of plastics depending on the application.

I am somewhat limited in that I want something that is inherently tinted as opposed to an interior film.

Glass is tricky for me locally because I can't get tempered stuff made to shape/size without sending away, thus the local guy using non-glass, and these windows aren't a standard. Part.of why they're so heavy is that the frames are several layers of aluminum thick, not the application specific extrusion that you see on e.g. a Leer or Leer-compatible.

 

Ah ok that makes more sense. I think you could probably do 1/4” tinted polycarbonate and come out ok. The scratches will always be a problem, but if you know of a good film that sounds like a good solution. 1/8” will probably flex too much.

 

First passes with 150 grit. The paint (I think it's actually a gelcoat) looked okay other than some chips and scratches (it's a 12 year old fiberglass topper I drag through the woods) but pretty quick into the first pass it was obvious there were certain areas where the coat was just about to start failing in a bad way.

Today I'm gonna go pick up some fresh resin and some fiberglass and get on the third eye hole, and probably disassemble and paint the marker light housings.

I have Durabak on order and will have to see if DD carries LEDs that fit the vintage side markers, or if I'm going to have to completely retrofit them.

 

First couple layers of glass are in the hole. I have literally never done this before so I am quite resigned to going slow and sanding a lot. I got the mat as opposed to cloth because it seemed like it would be better for really making sure the third eye cavity was as thoroughly packed as possible, even if it was messy as heck. It feels like I got what I wanted, but I'm gonna say this is definitely a learning process on a step by step basis.



The light housings are stripped, sanded, and the first mask is painted and curing. I'll do the second mask tomorrow while resin dries, or maybe before glass.

 

Well those turned out nice. Gonna let the gold cure for a couple days before I clearcoat them.

 

Alright. I did a pretty bad job with the fiberglass. This is third layer plus bondo, where it sits for now. I took these pics as checkpoints for comparison after seeing the painted shell. Much of this work is intended as a product test/process test for some custom bodywork and a full paint job on the truck.

Here are some gore shots of the fiberglass job:


This is the cutout for the original brake light. I first thought to dam it from the back with blue tape and build the fiberglass into this. Absolutely not. First batch of fiberglass ruined.

I did however have the presence of mind to use the last large piece to do it the way I should have to begun with, a layer of glass inside.



At this point I knew I had made the wrong choice with the non woven mat, but decided to go through it anyway because the money was already spent and the beer was already cold.

The first layer was not good my dudes.



I cleaned it up real good and then did my best to fill the uneven void with the next layer. After cleaning it up with sandpaper, I could see what I thought were incredibly shitty voids, which upon cleaning up with a razor and dental picks, they were.



Up to this point I had tried very hard to not billybob this. I acknowledged that effort and I set it aside.

I decided to try forcing reinforced Bondo, mixed thin, into the voids. I did a little more prospecting to see what surface holes were connected to what void and where, and just did it, one little tiny bit at a time. When I saw that it was actually working, I got everything as full as I dared against the thickening bondo, and used the remainder to overfill the surface voids.

After cleaning it up, you're left with what you see in the BLUF shots up top.

Im going to spend some time cleaning up the spatter and finish sanding the entire shell, bit as far as special attention to the crater, I'm calling it here. The Durabak 18 just showed up, and the weather the next few days is perfect for doing it. I got the "non-textured" stuff which will still, I believe, hide many sins that thinner body putty and glaze would have done the correct way, if not actually cutting out and redoing the fiberglass filler. I won't be drilling in the filled area, so whatever. Problem for the next guy (me), hidden by paint.

 

I got the whole exterior with 150 grit, then flipped it to clean the inside, take care of leftover seal adhesive, and check on the original repairs to the rot under the front sill.

I could immediately see that the repair had failed, probably due to a small amount of moisture getting in and doing what water does where it freezes.

I grabbed the router and dug out everything that was damaged, and decided the best thing to do would be to leave it open for a few days to get as much moisture out as possible. I may then go ahead and pack the cavity with silica gel and seal it in for a few more days after that. I don't want to do this again, so I'll do it right, or at least the best I can.



The adhesive came off very nicely with a heat gun and a putty knife with a chisel grind.

 

I went ahead and packed the cavity with silica beads last night and taped it over with some foil HVAC tape. I woke up this AM and saw that the beads had turned, with the ones right next to the wood maybe 80% full, and getting bluer toward the top, where the top layer was say 100% blue.

I dug around and found my broken wood moisture tester, rigged it the way I can rig it to make it work if I hold it just right, and got a reading of about 15% on the exposed wood. Is it wetter deeper? Probably, but not much deeper, cause this is the bottom as installed.

I decided to just go with it and keep an eye out for cracks or bulging later. FAFO.

Pressing on with the project, I prepared a batch of resin and then took an amount of the fiberglass mat, teased it apart a bit, and lightly mulched it, to shorten the fibers and hopefully make the wet composite easier to fumble with by hand. Honestly, that worked out great by my current standards, which are admittedly low.




There's today's first layer. I did vacuum out the cavity and use a dental pick to grab out each and every bead, but no further preparation of the surface. It was taped over clean last night, so I just went with it.

Another batch, not quite so finely mulched, then trimmed and sanded:



I did some trimming and sanding and rough leveling, using a combination of razor blade/random sander 150 grit/rubber sanding block 150 grit.

If I get better at this, I think I will be able to bump this kind of work to 60 or 80 grit and really move some material efficiently, but I'm sort of forcing myself to go slow and observe by conservative choices.

I threw down one more layer after this, trimmed/roughed/picked voids with dental picks and razorblade, and packed in some reinforced bondo. I'm going to do a bunch of sculpting tomorrow and then I'll throw down a full sheet over the entire contour of the breakthroughs. The repair scar will definitely be a detectable bump if you ever saw it naked and in the right light, but this is going to be gasketed to the truck with 1/2" heavy duty rubber gasketing and RTV. I'm not worried about a good seal.

I'll update with more pics in the morning, drink my coffee, and get at it tomorrow.

If the Ancestors smile tomorrow, it will go to sleep with the Durabak on it.

 

Pssst, gratuitous truck shots for those of you slagging along. The vibe is "Sunday... Sunday! SUNDAYYYYYYYYY!"

 

So the bondo sat up overnight, and here it is after sculpting and sanding. Anywhere I had bondo hitting the edges, I relieved it down below the finished profile to make sure it would be fully encased in fiberglass after final shaping.



I laid down a continuous strip of mat over the entire repair, wrapped around both edges. I'm going to do one more, wrapping only around the front, where the bad blowout was.



Here are the marker lights with a nice thick gloss clear on them:

 

I would be pretty salty if I had paid for this work but I didn't, so I'm going to accept it. Glass completed for this project. Not bad for baby's first fiberglass. The ugly parts are invisible when it's installed.

Gonna prime the bottom face, flip it over, hit any bad splatter or high spots, then prime the exterior. I'll drill the fixtures maybe tonight, maybe first thing in the AM, and then tomorrow is Durabak. The interior of the shell is getting a fancy liner so idgaf what it looks like, although I may prime and durabak the bottom inside flat portions.

 

Have you thought about putting some metal angle along the rail to reinforce it? My old ARE MX has this as the bottom rail.

 

That's not a terrible idea, but it's a pretty stiff structure as-is. I don't even get much flex when I manhandle it upside-down by myself.

When I durabak the truck, I'm going to replace the bedside caps with flat stock and gasket this shell down to that, so I'm not worried about stiffness when installed.

 

I got the mount holes for the new lights drilled (slightly oversize to give me a hair of wiggle room) and blew through the first sheet of 60 grit removing all existing gelcoat. Durabak is going on today if it kills me.