Farmall and Halloween

Fellow Farmall fans,

Thought you might enjoy the freshly done '50 C and a couple of spooky Halloween'ers. The white specks are the first snowfall of the year...just in time for trick 'n treating.

I'm told that the 3-year-old (Thomas) is a Hot Lava Monster Bat...I'm also told that this is a very scary thing ;-). The 5-year-old (Noah) is a more conventional snake.

- David

P.S. Update on the clutch issue for those who have been following along. An hour-long run did not budge the friction disk, and I noticed a harmonic vibration in the drive line while on the road...both of which could be explained by a bent disk...bent during my first, rather disasterous, engine install. I've got a new disk on the way, and I'll split the C this weekend if I get the chance.

I used a Sharpe HVLP gun and PGP's acrylic urethane for the top coat. I used their epoxy primer for the base coat on everything. The grill, hood, and gas tank got several iterations of bondo, sanding, then a sanding primer over the top.

I made sure that I put the top coat on within 72 hours of the epoxy primer -- apparently this will help the two coats bond together chemically. After that time, you'd have to scratch up the primer coat so there would be a mechanical bond between the coats. A lot more work, eh? Actually, I put the top coat on only an hour or two after I finished the primer, at least on the chassis.

I also pulled *everything* off the tractor and painted in separately. That made it easier to get a good glossy coat all around things like the oil filter housing, the fan blades, etc.

The chassis is pretty easy to paint...the roughness of the cast iron makes it almost impossible to run the paint on. I found it much harder on something like the hood, which would have a vertical side no matter how I positioned it. I had to be really careful to treat the verticals gently...the HVLP gun will put out a lot of paint.

I found two things were really important -- first, I spent *a lot* of time working the metal before I painted. I think I probably did 4 or 5 iterations of bondo/sanding/primer on the sheet metal before I could be certain I had really gotten it smooth. Second, I could have used twice the amount of light in the garage when I painted. It got really hard to see when I had put on just enough paint to get the shine. I wear glasses too, so trying to see through the paint fog, safety googles, and my glasses got really hard at times...

Hope that helps!

- David

John

I think it should be framed and hung up somewhere special!

Dave Olson - East-Central Illinois

No clear coat...just several coats of PPG's acrylic urethane. It was my first real paint job, and the paint was pretty forgiving stuff. Glad you like it!

- David

I pretty much just followed the directions...I think the color coat had a mix ratio of something like 8:1:1...color, reducer, and hardener. I used a slow topcoat hardener because the temp was in the 80's when I did most of the painting. According my neighbor (the paint expert!), that would assure that the paint would smooth out before it started to flash off.

I really can't take all the credit. I had someone looking over my shoulder most of the time to show me the ropes. He really knows his stuff too...he's had of his two cars on the cover of Hot Rod magazine. I'm lucky to have good teacher just a couple of houses away.

- David