I think that the blue in the picture above looks more like a medium blue in real life, it looks like a royal blue on my computer monitor.  They are acrylic urethane, and they will require a clear coat.  I am painting a vehicle for the first time, so I took the paint guy's advice on the paint itself.  They seemed to know what they were talking about, and they did recognize Cooter's tow truck when I showed them the picture of it!

With the help of a friend, I was able to take the wrecker bed off of the black Chevy and move it onto a trailer.  I will take it to the welding shop in town and the welder will install it onto the Ford.  It has a few rust spots that need patched, and he could do a much better job on it than I ever could.  I am going to try to give the Ford a final sanding this week, and hopefully paint the cab this weekend. 

Thanks for the update. Keep up the good work!

You're really doing a great job on this! I can't wait to see it painted.

I replaced the original rusty fender with this one, just a little dusty at the time:

As you can see, the truck was sanded to bare metal, body filler was applied to the dents, I primed it with epoxy primer, then painted it.  My bondo skills left something to be desired, as I didn't get the dents as smooth as I had intended.  I had also planned on wet sanding it after primer, but apparently epoxy primer is very tough to wet sand, so that didn't happen.  The painting itself was very easy, but I made a few mistakes here and there that will be corrected on my next paint job.  I'd say that the truck is a good 20 footer at this point--not bad for an amateur job but not great either.  It's like Cooter's real tow truck, a little rough around the edges!

I take the truck to the welding shop Wednesday to have the wrecker bed installed.  I hope to have it back by 21st at the latest, so that I will still have time to sand and paint the bed and then take it to Luray Virginia for Cooter's Last Stand.  

Gonna be sweet! Really impressed that you found the accurate wrecker rear!

What an awesome project. I love it when someone like you continues to post your progress. We've been disappointed a few times with folks who never updated us after getting us excited that we'd get to see the project from start to finish. Thanks for sticking with it.

I got the truck back from the welding shop today.  I will have the bed sanded down by Thursday night, and hopefully prime it Friday night and paint it on Saturday.  The Sunday and Monday will be installing the grill and wrecker booms, lights, emblems, decals, and other odds and ends.  I would like to put on the new carburetor before Dukesfest but I'm not for sure that I will have enough time, unless it fits with little modification.  The truck runs ok, but it currently will not idle at normal rpm.

Any suggestions on what color to paint the rims?  In all of the photos that I have looked at, the rims are always seemingly dust covered.  I am thinking possibly a light grey color, but am not for sure.

 

I was going to post an updated picture of the wrecker, but I am apparently out of my free photobucket 3rd party hosting and I will have to find another way to post pictures on here.  I don't have time to figure that out right now as I leave very early in the morning to go to Dukesfest.  The truck is 99% complete, I was going to put on the door mirrors tonight to finish it up, but one of the brackets broke, so neither mirror is going on right now.  I will do my best to post pictures of my truck as well as the happenings at Dukesfest next Tuesday night.

In an incomprehensible move, image hosting site Photobucket changed their terms about a month ago so that you could only use their service for 3rd party hosting if you upgraded to their premium account at $400/year. Overnight, they broke links to around a billion (yes, a billion) images across the internet, wiping out years worth of their users' content on blogs, forums and even eBay listings with no warning. Your choice? Pay $400 up front (no monthly options) for a service which has been free for over a decade, or lose your images. Some people have suggested that the new marketing model is based on the recent ransomware virus scams. My Photobucket images are safe until January because I'm a paying user, but I'm not paying a 1000% increase for renewal when rival sites offer the same (and probably more reliable) service for $40-$50/year. They finally sent me an email earlier this week trying to imply that I was a valued customer, and offering me a 50% discount so I could "beat the rush". The only rush has been all the users leaving a sinking ship. I have over 1800 images on HazzardNet (and over 8,000 on another site) which will disappear in a few months if Photobucket don't see sense or I don't find a replacement. Even if I do find an alternative, I'm going to have literally weeks if not months of work uploading my images to a new site and then editing several thousand posts to update the image links. I can't even back up my images at the moment - I guess everyone else is trying to do the same thing.

When PB did what they did I switched to Imgur and was shocked at how much easier it is to use. I can upload a dozen photos in LITERALLY the amount of time it took to upload a single one on PB. I should have switched years ago!!!

Several months ago I saw that my Photobucket account was at about 90% full so I started using Flickr.  Flickr is much easier to use and uploads pictures much faster.  I'll never be able to replace all the pictures in the various forums I belong to.  There are just too many to replace.  

You high tech guys amaze me. I can't even figure out what those two buttons do on my wife's car keys. She told me when she presses one a robot drone changes the oil and when she presses the other a different robot rotates the tires. I didn't want her to think I didn't believe her so when she was in the house I tried the button that was supposed to change the oil. It didn't work. All it did was lock the car doors. I pressed it again and the doors locked again but the horn beeped too. She ran out of the house wondering why I was beeping. I told her I was trying to change the oil with that fancy button on her key. She just smiled and said it must not be working right and walked back in the house. The lesson I learned about technology that day is to never depend on it because it always malfunctions. 

Geez, what a mess. All of that was news to me, I will try Imgur or Flickr when I get back home. If photobucket wants to start charging exhorbitant fees that is fine, but to break years worth of links and pictures is atrocious business practices. Is anyone else here going to be at Dukesfest?

I wish I could go!  I'm looking forward to seeing pictures of your Cooter 1967 Ford wrecker.

Was hoping when I first heard about it, but sadly, no-go. Wish very, very badly I was....

It's driving me crazy not getting to go to Cooter's Last Stand but we just got back from vacation in Thousand Islands New York late last night so I couldn't fit it in.