Trucks! All Star Auto Body Thrash

Today, we've got seven of the very best custom hot rod builders in the nation helping us take project super duly from a rough shell to a primed and ready to paint truck in just one show. It's all today here on trucks.

Hey guys, welcome to trucks. Well, there's a lot going on. We've got a room full of people

and a room full of action because we're pretty serious about making some good progress on the painting body side of things for project super duly.

And we're hoping to take it from how it sits now to ready for paint by the end of the show. So, needless to say we've got our work cut out for us and if you're wondering who all these guys are that are cutting, grinding, welding and making noise. Well, they're not just day laborers that we picked up from the local temp agency.

Ryan's right.

We've assembled a team of the baddest paint and body guys in the country and although you may not recognize their faces, I know you've seen their work. We're calling this the truck CV, auto body thrash. So we're gonna take a minute and introduce you to the team.

Welcome to the trucks, auto body crash

in the shop today. Alan Shepley

Allen owns Mustang Central in Byron Georgia and specializes in custom resto mods concourse restorations and full on race and performance mustangs. He's even got 10 years experience in experimental engineering and prototyping.

Tim. Strange

Tim operates strange motion rotting customs out of Cambridge, Illinois.

Their specialty is custom street rods and Wicked street machines.

Racking up multiple awards including America's top custom award for 52 Buick Copper,

Randy Borcherding.

Randy's shop is paint house in Houston, Texas where they crank out high end customs restorations and flawless paint jobs. Randy's had several of his vehicles featured on power block and regularly competes at national and international car shows consistently bringing home awards, Eric Saliba,

we've shown you Eric's Little Shop of horrors down in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee before where they crank out custom projects with a focus on blending

new technology and nostalgic looks. In just a few short years. Eric's built impressive vehicles that have been featured both on TV and in print, Jeff Greening. Jeff is half of the father and son team that owns Greening auto company and with over 40 years experience and a true passion for the automotive industry. Jeff is responsible for the stunning paint and body work that has won them worldwide notoriety and a long list of very happy clients,

Jessi Greening Jesse's the other half and his amazing talent has led them to place as one of the great eight finalists for the highly coveted Riddler award. They've also been a Street Rod of the year finalist as well as in 08, see

best GM vehicle award winners.

Brian Finch.

Brian's the proprietor of Finch Hot Rod Transformations out of Hermitage Tennessee.

His specialty is sixties and seventies era muscle cars and he builds them bumper to bumper, including the paint work. He's on his way to becoming a top builder in the custom pro touring ranks.

Ok. Now that you met the guy, here's the plan. Basically, we got the truck divvied up into about three sections. The bed being the most challenging since we're having to make our own duly fenders. Then there's a cab with the doors placed on stands in different places around the room and then finally the front nose section or what we refer to it as the dog house. Now, we're doing a couple of different things, but you better pay attention because these guys are good and they're fast.

Now we're calling this a thrash, but don't think for a second that it's unorganized. These guys know exactly what to do and each team member fell into a job and got business.

Now, everybody has a different specialty street rods, mini trucks, muscle cars. But the common thread to all of this is good, old fashioned, hard work.

And we're going to have to cut through some trusty crap metal to make room for some brand new good metal.

OK? We're running a shape line here to make sure we cut this panel off straight.

We're making sure we're just cutting the elder panel.

Since I get this cut out, we're gonna grind it.

Randy's gonna cut a panel and

put it right here on the,

on this edge here.

Now, a lot of guys including myself prefer to use a mig welder for sheet metal,

but it takes a lot of finesse to tig weld single walled sheet metal because of the incredibly focused heat zone.

I'm just trying to even up the gap so we can keep bringing the metal together where we, it's easier just to take together. And the reason we're taking it together is

also help us not have to grind so much with it.

So

now some of these sheet metal panels are brand new but other places we had no choice but to work with what was already there.

And Randy Bing

takes a crack at stating the obvious. Well, I've discovered some rust. It's kind of hard to tell, I'm sure. But these are rusty areas.

There's some really tiny ones back here, but they imply that the metal is really thin all the way along here.

So I'm gonna cut out this whole area.

We'll make a patch weld it back in.

Yeah, I think we can bring it back from the dead.

We're gonna resurrect this one.

Now, some of the cool stuff we get to show you are the homemade tools and techniques from all of these guys like this tip from

e

you're pulling a crown into an otherwise flat panel to match the contour of the factory stamp door.

It works perfectly.

Now, they make patch panels for a lot of this truck but not this door. This is one of the rare shorter doors for the quad cab truck. So what Eric has done is using some 20 gauge flat sock and a break made his own

panel and rolled it under.

That's what,

that's what 10 or 15 years of hacking up many trucks will do for you that

job.

Now, the front of the door skin was good here, but the backside in the jam was ate up with the rust. Nobody makes a patch panel for this. So, Brian tell them what you're doing.

So if Kevin said we wanna, we wanna maintain the integrity of this front panel, keep it. We don't have to do a lot of work. We cut out where all the rot was. Make a new patch filler piece in here.

We separate the panels, clean out all the rust, treat it with some, some good metal prep. Come back in with a small strip of metal on the backside.

We'll weld it along the end, grind it good as new.

Now, it seems like a lot of work for just a small patch. But these guys know if you do it once and you do it right. Exactly.

Up next. More of the truck's auto body thrash. Stay tuned.

Hey, guys, welcome back to the shop. As you can hear, we're running wide open and our all star crew is making some awesome progress on our project. Super duly paint and body thrash session.

Now, they've already got one customized duly fender already welded in and looking really, really good.

Now, all they gotta do is replicate it on the other side.

The problem is it looks like this. It's beat up, banged up, rusty, just play nasty more than a few hours away from looking like the other side. But I've got faith

and I know just enough about body work

to stay the heck out of the way when these guys are in the room.

But one thing that's gonna hold these guys up before they get to the other side and do the other fender flare is replacing some of the 40 year old rotted and well used bed floor section.

While L MC does offer complete bed floor replacements. We opted just for a few sections

and just welded it to the solid middle section

since this is going to be a work truck

that's going to get covered up with bed liner anyway.

And no, this is not, Ian Johnson's hair dryer. It's a really cool tool we picked up from

Macco that recycles the blast media and captures it. So it doesn't shoot out into the rest of the room. It does a great job.

Oh yeah.

Now it's a great turning point in any project when we graduated from the hardcore metal work to use a little bit of filler to fine tune the panels. Obviously, Eric's got the perfect ratio of harder,

but now any major paint and body project is a process of constant refinement, especially when you're used to the level of fit and finish that these professionals are,

you can tell a pro by their attention to detail, check the panel gap. It's oe standard, it's nice and even all the way to the top, but you follow it down to where Alan made his patch and it gets a little wider. Alan walk me through what you're going to do.

Well,

Kevin, this has been anything but typical. We have nine guys attacking this thing at one time. Normally, when you build this pa

that you would have the door on the truck. But due to the problem of people being on this vehicle, at the same time, I had to do the door off the truck.

So now I just snuck over here while nobody was looking and stuck the door on here and I see we have a gap problem. So what I'm gonna do is come in and weld this up and close in the gap and smooth it off and be good as new

with the ultra thin layer of Bondo blocked out and blended into the rest of the door perfectly. These guys were ready to move on to the next step

and that meant dragging a lot of the exterior panels and the doors into the paint booth for a heavy coat of black polyester primer.

Now, Brian Finch is spraying the cloth in primer,

but Brian Smith of auto body color and supply hooked us up big time with all of our paint and body materials.

Jessi and Tim started over with brand new sheet metal for the passenger side of the bed, but they still had to figure out how to make room for the matching duly fender.

What we're doing is figuring out the location of this fender

where it is and put it over on the other side,

we run a straight edge along these body lines which are factory

measured from flat over locating point. Same here, locating, run a straight edge across this body line down through the center line of these trim clips which are the same locations from the factory on the other side

measure down to give us points

and when we go and transfer over to the other side,

and although Tim Strange is pretty handy with the welder Elvis called and he wants his belt back

now with the first round of primer dry and ready to block Brian and Allen attacked it with 100 grip which is very aggressive sandpaper, but most of the primer is going to end up on the floor since this is the last stage of your filler work.

And here's why I had faith in Tim and Jessi with the precision tig work they did. It took very little body builder to make our new duly fender seamless.

The auto body thrash was a week long exercise in an unbelievable amount of activity.

And there was no pretense with any of these guys. Everybody had fun, got along great. And when one job got finished, well, everybody just tag teamed up on the next one until piece by piece, section by section and project by project super duly really was starting to take shape and even though it may look like a TV studio smashed into a body shop, real progress was definitely being made

done

up next. Super duly coming together. Stick around.

There you go.

Welcome back to trucks with hours and hours of filler work done. We're finally ready to throw some primer onto the cab

now with a half acre of sheet metal on the roof panel and 30 years of life as a work truck. Well, guess what? You're going to have a little bit of filler build up, but it's ok because it's very thin and it's going to level out the surface. The it'll take primer and be able to be blocked out quite easily.

The surface here that we're using again is Clawson. All you need high build polyester primer

surface and it is literally spray Bondo.

It's the next stage in the body work process and the final stage of the filler.

Now, since we had so many different highly qualified people, we kind of traded off on some duties.

This is the second coat of primer after blocking on the doors and the first coat on the hood.

Eric wanted a shot at shooting the poly through the giant 2.5 orifice on the in

a water spray gun. So he went to work laying down a fat coat of poly primer.

Now, after these panels have been blocked once and re primed again, you can really see the fact that these cats know what they're doing.

The reflection of the wet primer shows that these panels are laser straight and really are ready for paint.

Now, the bed assembly was probably the most ambitious section of the body work with both bedsides being beat up and rusty and not having any dooly fenders. Well, it was a very aggressive project. Tim and Jessi did an awesome job grafting in the L MC steel fenders into the bed in True Street Rod style and it shows up in Randy's primer

since this project took place over several days, we had plenty of time to allow the primer to dry completely.

And once it was, we strapped it up to our crane using several heavy duty ratchet straps with the help of five or six guys, we carefully lowered it down onto the frame,

check it out. This is the first time we see super duly with all the body work done. We get to see it as a truck again. These guys work fast. So pay attention.

We're gonna split up in the teams. Have people start hanging the doors,

we gonna get the dog house assembled on the front, hang defenders on it,

set the hood.

And then the last thing is we'll grab the the bed, set the bed on, good as new.

Now, we were focused mainly on the exterior body panel and we'll get the inner fenders, the under hood and the inside of the cab painted completely. Once we're a little further down the road.

Now, the reassembly along with the rest of the project was a complete and total team effort

with everybody gelling and working side by side like they've known each other for years

and we'd have these guys back in the truck shop any day of the week.

Now, this is just one of the many, many times we're gonna have this thing disassembled and reassembled so

the gaps aren't perfect but

it's there. It's cool.

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Hey guys, welcome back to the shop, check it out. The primer is barely dry, the body reassembled and sitting back on the chassis and all the hard work that our all star crew put in has paid off big time. This thing looks flat out mean

with over 200 years of collective experience, the team managed to stuff in over 400 hours of labor in just under five days. We're not kidding

and check out we got cool custom duly fenders. The panel gaps are right, the panels are straight, all the rust is gone and this thing's in final primer ready to sand, shoot some color on and we know this thing is well on its way to becoming the cool project that we planned out on paper. But don't forget you can get any one of these guys to help you with your project as well. Just follow the web link on the trucks and power block websites and look them up. Just don't hire them all at once.

Now, on behalf of everybody here at trucks TV, we wanted to send you home with some stuff. So we got you a cool trucks T shirt in your size, a license tag, some neat stickers and some licorice which needs no explanation whatsoever.

And on behalf of our friends at an NSA water spray equipment. We're sending each one of you home with one of their brand new supernova spray guns, which is designed by Pina Farina, nice piece of gear.

And when all seriousness guys, thank you so much for your hard work and time. If you got any questions over what you've seen on today's show or you wanna get in touch with these guys. Go to the power block website, trucks, tv.com. Check it out. Thanks for watching trucks.

See y'all next time.

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