What's next, what's now?

So what's next? What's happening now?

Nothing.

Wait, you read this blog. Some of you have even met Cowboy, so you know this is an impossibility.

The new, the now, is a redo of Frankentruck. The middle minion was unfortunate enough to blow the head gasket on her motor. However, this provided the perfect opportunity to really make the Apache back into Frankentruck.

The last few months he has been working on putting her on a 4x4 K-10 Blazer and is she a beast, a beautiful beast that barely fits in the garage.

 More pictures will be added as we go along and I'll provide some flashbacks as well.

July 25 Continued

What was that? What happened to the Trans Am?

That one came out much better than the Nissan. We painted it, updated the exhaust and did a few other minor repairs. I am grateful for the girl minion's wise choice of going with a newer car.  

And the final result, Attack on Titans Trans Am.

July 25

I'm going to jump ahead. Far ahead. We'll play catch-up and bring you up to speed.

We finished the Nissan. This was by far the most challenging thing we've ever done. It has also made us realize that fitting a domestic car into an import poses many issues that aren't always over come.

But it was adorable.

Just look at it!  It was finished in April.

Then, a week later...



I broke it.

The person in front of me stopped short and I broke the car. All those hours of awful fiberglass sanding and itching messed up in one second.  It was extremely hard to not cry on the side of the road.

We fixed it, got a different bumper, but it just wasn't the same.



The middle minion fell in love with it instead. He drove it for a while, but after driving it more, looking at how we put it together, the middle one's tendancy to be drive hard and fast, and the fact that it's a tiny fiberglass car, we dismantled it.

It wasn't as safe as we wanted or as reliable. There were many issues that we just couldn't overcome due to the original design of the car.

It was probably one of the hardest car lessons we've had. As I look at the pictures though, it was so damn cute and I miss it. There is part of me that wants to do another one, older that we can actually find parts for, but I don't know that I have the energy for that one.

December 14

Today was one of those wonderfully mild December days which gave us the opportunity to work on the interior of the car. We have to create a storage/speaker area behind the seats and a new trunk cover.

We worked earlier this week on the rear interior panels. These are a mash up of the old Datsun interior panels combined with the Camaro ones. They'll require a lot of fiberglass work once it gets warmer than this weeks upcoming forecast.

The area behind the seats will hold speakers, an amp and provide ample space to put things behind the seats. We made templates out of foam core and had to do some minor adjustments.

We've used MDF for constructing both the shelf behind the seats and the door over the spare tire. These will eventually be carpeted.

Foam core templates. You can see the interior panels in this shot as well.

Look, it's all the cars in one photo! I never EVER would have thought I would be married to a gear head. EVER. Or that there would be this many cars in my driveway on a normal day.

 Template removed to make a pattern for cutting the MDF.

Screwing supports on the front panel to hold the top.

Cowboy was commenting during this that working with wood was so 

much easier than working with metal. He does like to build.

Rear shelf done and in place.

Trunk lid in place. No construction photos on this since I was 

holding the board while he was cutting. 

Views of both new interior pieces.

October 16

The body work is finished. Not bad for a Datsun on a Camaro with a Nissan body kit.

October 5

Yesterday was my birthday. Woo hoo! For another six months I will be older than Cowboy. I know, shocker, I'm the old one. This amuses him, more so since work and teenagers have turned him into a silver fox. (He's going to be both annoyed and smug about that comment.)

To celebrate this birthday, instead of going out Saturday, we went out Friday evening for a shopping/date night. Cowboy is a pretty good shopping companion and very agreeable, even when we have to go back to the store AFTER we've gotten and return my shoes since I grabbed the wrong size. This left Saturday, my actual birthday, free to do what I really wanted to do, clean the house and work on the car.

I should mention, the house is pretty clean most days, but we have minions so it's never spotless and their things like to migrate from their rooms.

Car progress Saturday was awesome. Most of the bondo work is done on the car with only a few low spots left to smooth out.

This leads to today. Cowboy added the last spots of bondo and started sanding while I finished up some things inside. Around three we started discussing when we could primer. It's October, after all, which means it could be anywhere between 30 degrees or 90 degrees.  After looking at the weather, we decided to make a push and get the sanding done today so we could primer. We did have to compromise and not finish the body work on the front bumper so we could prime the car today.

But, we did it. We got the sanding done!

Cowboy spraying out the garage before we primer.

Rear view.

Passenger side.

Flash coat of primer. It's tinted slightly blue so we see it before we sand all the way through back to the metal. 

See that hole? That was on the passenger side of the car. Cowboy had to move the gas filler to the driver's side since that's where it was on the Camaro. 

What is impressive about this, he cut the hole with the SAWS-ALL. Seriously, he cut that hole with a reciprocating saw. Not a fancy circle cutter, or a plasma torch, but a reciprocating saw. This amuses me to no end. It's one of those weird skills he's developed. It's even more amusing because he doesn't use some fancy Kyobi or DeWalt, he uses this one, that he bought at Harbor Freight, on sale and with a coupon.  He did have a fancy name brand one, but it didn't last any longer than the one from Harbor Freight so he's back to this one. But then again, I don't think they were really designed to cut apart cars for hours at a time.

Driver's side after blue flash coat.

Passenger side after blue flash coat. 

Finally we get to the thing he's been waiting for all summer, the surfacing coat. This is the point when we can get a vision of how the car will look when we're done. I cried from sheer joy. It's so damn cute. LOOK AT IT! It's adorable. Cowboy says it looks like an 80's Corvette with a bigger hatchback. Bite your tongue Cowboy. That looks like Dune buggy and Speed Racer's car had a car baby. It is adorable though even though it's been an itchy fiberglass pain.

LOOK AT IT! It's just so darn cute. Even better, you can't tell that we pieced it together from things that weren't really designed to go together. It looks like it's always been this way.

That my friends, is love, hours and hours of love. Not only Cowboy's love for making something unique, and solving problems, but his love for his family, and in this car instance, me. I know why oldest minion and middle minion cry when their cars are messed up, because they love them so very much. I think that's the best part of my birthday weekend, the love.

September 28

I know, this is a huge jump ahead in time, but it has been incrementally slow lately. The kids started school, the middle one is back in cross country, it's been hot, and I traveled with Cowboy to LA last week.

We're almost done with the exterior body work. Now it's more glass and more sanding. I hate sanding fiberglass. I swear, even with long sleeves and my entire body covered, I'm still itchy.

You can see the car is taking shape finally and is quite jaunty. Cowboy has done some very nice body work on this. Including cutting out the other hole for the exhaust in the back bumper.