Well fellas, baby steps, but I'm grinding along.
Like I said last post, I fell into some extra money by selling an old Harley I had laying around. I used it to pay my taxes on my rent house, buy mama new Michelins for her Explorer, and get set up to do powdercoating.
Like everything, I went way too deep into it. I went beyond hobbiest level and closer to job shop level. I bought a ton of powder, a real decent blast cabinet, an oven, and I'm about to start building a big oven to do core supports, rear axle housings, bumpers, and motorcycle frames.
So today's progress was powdercoating some parts for the project.
Member BigblockBurris on here hooked me up on the dually lug nut plates I needed, so they fell under the gun first. The powder color is called silver vein. I absolutely love this color. It's intended to be textured.
Then, I stripped my front calipers off the 84 dually frame stub I bought and coated them, again in the silver vein color.
I went down to O Reillys and ordered the two rebuild kits I need for the calipers. Some folks swear you can coat an assembled caliper and no damage is done, but I went ahead and stripped the caliper apart so I could get it truly clean before coating. Besides, these calipers are 25 years old now, so new seals and boots are a good idea. The kits run about 6 dollars per side. The pistons and bores look great, so I expect them to work out well.
After that, I began the most dreaded task of this build, the wheels.
Before:
Now, Bright white powder and a metric buttload of work stripping and prepping the wheel. There is a lot of surface area on one of these things, and I wanted it perfect :
With one of the lugnut plates set into place:
I also scored a really nice set of chrome dually wheel center caps on the ebay. They finally arrived after two weeks waiting. They are the ones that use the plastic lugnuts that screw down onto the steel lugnuts. I will get pictures of them next time I'm out in the shop.