A Turn in the Right Direction

It has been a couple weeks since our last installment, I hope the wait wasn't too difficult for you reader(s). Outside of painting this pig each member of Team Awesome lives a busy life so a blog update was put on the back burners of at least my to-do list.

After encountering misfortune on October 6th that nearly broke every one's resolve, we all left the Bundy house in a sour mood. It was dark, cold, wet, and all our beloved tools had seemed to have forsaken us. Through deep soul searching team awesome was able to find the courage to continue our work. There we a few key events that helped pump everybody back up to full confidence. Bundy Sr. was reported to have "woken up in the middle of the night and knew exactly what was wrong with the air compressor," so that problem was taken care of. We also discovered that the paint needed to be thinned so that it would spray properly.

One the morning of October 12th Team Awesome gathered at the Bundy residence and prepared to work. Blake was busy and could not make it but we were able to pick up his paint gun and other equipment beforehand. We also gained a new member that day. Matt, aka Blue, volunteered his services and as a current student at PCC studying Diesel Technology, he was sure to have some of his own insight and experience to add. After munching down some Egg Mcmuffins and complaining about how we weren't winning a million dollars despite having quite a few Monopoly game pieces, we donned our masks and got ready to paint.


The weather was considerably better than the week before so we were able to set up our high-tech paint booth outside in the driveway. After loosing the air compressor with paint still in the gun on the previous session, we poured it in a jar and stuck in the fridge in hopes of saving it from drying in the atmosphere. Upon reopening it after a week of sitting, we were greeted by a grey rubbery substance that was no longer a liquid. A few bucks of paint down the drain, oh well. Not to be discouraged, we began to fill up the paint gun with primer from our can, being sure to add enough thinner so that it easily stirred. The first door was placed in the booth and cleaned with wax/grease remover. The next couple moments were tense for team awesome. Yes the Air compressor was fixed, but would it stay fixed long enough for us to finish painting the doors? Was the paint thinned enough?JJ opted to be the first painter. He squeezed the trigger of the gun and out came a stream of primer many times fuller and smoother than what we were getting the previous week. Success!! Everything was working just as it should. JJ then proceeded to spray a coat of primer over the first door. After that JJ and I took the freshly painted door to another spot to dry while Matt and Greg place another door onto the painting booth. This process was then repeated until all the doors had three coats of primer on them. Doing most of the painting was JJ, but Greg, Matt, and I all painted at least one of the coats of primer. We encountered a slight problem, but after what we had been through, it was nothing. In the midst of the spraying Greg noticed that the overspray was more than we anticipated and was giving the interior door panels an artistic, though obviously unintentional, grey flake effect. All it took was some paint thinner, a paper towel, and some good-ole scrubbing to get it off. Expert taper Greg then upgraded the doors' taping jobs so that the remaining coats of primer would not get on the door panels. While this was going on Matt was investigating a replacement fender Bundy had to switch out with a dented fender on the Pig. This fender was made up of 2 halves and we only needed the lower one so Matt had to find a way to split the welded halves apart. Sometime toward the end of painting Warren stopped by to offer his services in the form of a Costco pizza and Mountain Dews for all. The day was going even better than we had expected.

Before we knew it the doors were primed, dry, and ready to be returned to their proper places. Just before remounting the doors, Bundy brought out a new toy that would accelerate our progress in future removal of old paint. He brought out a small grinder about the size of an electric drill and turned it on and with only a few light passes over a section of the car, had found shiny bare metal. It was amazing. we quickly spot-primed those couple spots to prevent rust. Putting on the doors was an easy task that everyone got involved in. Even Bundy, who had been supervising most of the day and doing the whole "dad" thing for Zoe came down to directly assist us. There was a positive vibe inside every member of Team Awesome that day. One by one the doors assumed their positions. The weld that the Bundys had made lined up perfectly with the hinge. After the doors were all attached we declared Mission Accomplished and began to clean up the mess we had made.
Next was a discussion on what to tackle next. Should we go at the roof? The hood? The quarter panels? Each would present its own unique challenges. We decided not to let that get in the way of our current victory and end it at that.
Team Awesome has not yet made an official statement on how to proceed, but rest assured that very soon the Pig will be more gray than it is any other color!

Reconnection

Thanks to my Dad and his formidable welding skills, we were able to reattach the section of the right passenger door that had completely torn out. If I remember correctly, he used a wire welder with a stainless wire. There wasn't much metal to work with, but he is quite skilled in these matters. Thanks Dad!

Let The Games Begin

I believe I have finally come to terms with what happened this last Saturday (10/6). At least enough that I may relay the story to you, my faithful audience, for you have a right to know the current status of our progress. I digress.

Team Awesome had previous planned to meet up at Mr. Bundy's house around 9-10am. I know that I personally awoke to my alarm that morning excited to get a major part of our project done and out of the way. I got myself up and ready, planning just enough time to stop by McDonald's and pick us up some Sausage Egg McMuffins with Cheese. I arrived at the Bundy household around 9:30am, and finding myself to be the first one there, I walked up to the door and made my presence known. Mr. Bundy showed up at the door and we walked on down to the garage. There he began to inform me of his ideas of what we could do where, and what he had as far as materials for us to work with. Luckily, we had planned to bring most everything we needed ourselves, so we didn't have to rely on him for much. After a few minutes I asked him if he had gotten the air compressor from his dad like he said he was going to, and he said he had just called him and that we were going to head out to pick it up in a few minutes. And so it began.

Arriving a few minutes later at the humble abode of Mr. Bundy's father, Mr. Bundy, we discovered that he was in the process of changing the oil in the air compressor. What a funny coincidence that this was the one time that we needed to borrow it, and that it was also the first time his father had decided to change the oil in it. So we ended up waiting about 20 minutes or so for him to finish before we loaded it up into the back of his dad's truck. He followed us back to Mr. Bundy's house and as we arrived we pulled in just behind Jason and Blake. We got the air compressor unloaded and started setting up our operation.

We decided to put the doors on a couple sawhorses so that we would be able to stand up while we worked on them instead of kneeling all day. This ended up working beautifully, as it allowed for less wobbling of the doors as well as preserving our delicate frames. Our first hiccup came with the discovery that the oscillating sander we had been lent was leaking air badly, and as such worked about as well as a tricycle would when going at 300mph. Thus we retired the famed oscillator and instead opted for electric sanders. The electric sanders actually turned out to work surprisingly well for what they were, so it wasn't all that bad. Mr. Bundy's dad dropped by about an hour later with a 2-handed electric paint stripper. The thing was a beast. Jason volunteered to figure out how to use it, so for the rest of the day Jason would take the first pass at all the doors. We gave him a hard time about carving his own "topographical map" on one of the doors, but always in jest because we knew we wouldn't be able to do any better.

Luckily for us, the doors we had already primed proved very easy to prepare again. The rattle can primer came off with basically no effort at all. So much so that Jason was able to strip both of them down in the time that it took Blake and I to prep one of the still-painted doors. Somewhere along the line we made another interesting discovery regarding the front passenger door. When we laid it on the sawhorses, we noticed that the plate that the bottom hinge attaches to had rusted out and snapped off, and was currently lying inside of the door. We had a good long gander and nervous giggle about that, and continued on our merry way, chalking it up as another new addition to our 'to do' list.

Around 2pm we called Greg, as he should have been done with the SAT's around 1pm or so. He made his way over and started taping off the doors we had already fully prepped. Around 4pm we were finished prepping all of the doors, and Greg was about halfway done taping them off. Blake and I began to investigate our primer and air gun situation as Jason and Greg pushed ever onward. You see, none of us had ever used an air gun before, so we were fearing the worst. After we decided that the gun would be safe because the primer was indeed lacquer thinnable, we began to look around for someplace to set up an impromptu paint booth. We had several issues confronting us though, the largest of these being that it had just begun to rain pretty steadily. We also had to worry about our anticipated overspray as we didn't want to cover any of the cars, houses, or anything else with primer besides the doors.

We eventually decided that the retaining wall held the most promise. We did our best to make ourselves a little alcove out of tarps and bedsheets, but it was very small, and lacked sides. This was alright until Blake had to kneel on the gravel to spray the door, and the rain started coming in sideways, covering the door in water. Not good. To add to the asthetic pleasure we were currently drowning in, the primer was doing something that looked more like spitting out onto the door, rather than spraying. Blake was very unhappy with how it was looking and how rough it was, but we consoled him by telling him we would just sand it later. That said, Blake went on to finish priming the entire door. Now came the part no one had bothered to think about yet. We needed to move the door to under Mr. Bundy's deck to let it dry before it's next coat. The only complication being that we needed to keep it as dry as possible in transit and it was still pouring. We gave Blake the job of laying the paper out under the deck so that the door would have something to rest on instead of bare bricks.

I don't know who suggested it or what we were thinking, but the next thing I knew Greg and I were holding a flowered bedsheet over the heads of Blake and Jason as they carried the door. That was quite the experience, and the door probably would have sayed drier had we thrown it into the Atlantic Ocean. Once we reached the deck, we found that Blake had apparently not been able to manage the spreading out of the paper. Instead, he had wadded it up and thrown it in a corner. Needless to say Greg, Jason and I were dumbfounded as we quickly tried to spread them out. We got the door set down and Blake went to work dabbing the water off of it. The next excitement came when Blake kned he had dried the whole door, only to look up and see a new bead running down the front. He looked up and realized that our drying station was perfect, minus the leaky deck.

Now it was really starting to rain. With our exceptionally moderate success fresh in our minds, we pondered whether or not we should move the 'paint booth' just inside the garage, as Mrs. Bundy had told us we could if we needed to. After a semi-heated debate, we started migrating into the garage. Once everything was moved inside the whole process seemed to be going much smoother. We no longer had the rain to contend with, so that was a big plus. Yet once again we were baffled as we observed that the primer was still coming out less smooth than we had hoped. Deciding that it was good enough, we pressed onward. Greg finished getting all four of the doors taped with some help from Jason as Blake and I worked on priming them.

Greg had to leave shortly after he finished taping the last door. This left Jason, Blake and I to finish up the project. This was fine until disaster struck Team Awesome square in the forehead. We had one door with two coats of primer, one with a single coat, and one with half a coat when the air compressor died on us. Not just stalled or leaked, it died outright. Despite our best efforts, we could not get it to turn back on. Our hopes of finishing that night went up in non-compressed air.

This was very hard for us to swallow. This meant that we wouldn't be able to reattatch the doors, leaving Mr. Bundy with no doors indefinitely as we enter into the wettest time of the year. It also meant that the ~$20 in primer that was still left in the gun was going to go to waste. Not only that, but we didn't have any way to force thinner through the gun, so it was very possibly going to sieze up and leave us stranded next time. Mr. Bundy's dad came down and tried to fix it, but he pretty much summed it up in one two word phrase I won't mention here.

We had done everything we could do, and we all set to cleaning up the garage with heavy hearts full of disappointment and maybe even a dash of shame. For the first time in the Paint the Pig project, we had effectively failed what we set out to do.

That said, we're all geared up and ready to redeem ourselves on our no-school day this Friday. Check back this weekend to see if we succeeded, or if Team Awesome again finds itself in Sadland. We're makin' that lemonade, don't you worry.

Cork in the Water

Bruce Lee advises us to be like a cork in the water. This allows one to be aware of the inevitable ups and downs of life while keeping them in proper perspective. As I observed Team Awesome in action this weekend, I couldn't help but admire the perspective they are bringing to this task. As Team Awesome finds door hinges torn completely out of the surrounding steel, re-sands doors already primed, braves potential rainstorms, and watches as each mechanical device (designed to be timesaving) folds like a cheap card table, they are unyielding in their resolve, and taking things in stride. As with most things in life, what this project appears to be about is not really what it will be about in the end. As Robert Pirsig states in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

"The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of the process, to achieve and inner piece of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon."

When Zoe walked out onto the driveway, she asked what the boys were doing. I tried to explain, then handed her the sanding block and pointed her to the rear panel of the car. She watched the boys intently, then proceeded to sand away with great focus. She would pause, look over at them, then get back to it.

To work well, to care, to become part of the process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. Is this not what we are aspiring to do as students, parents, teachers, and musicians?

Updates

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The Mighty Oscillator Arrives (and other pictures)

Greetings stranger. My name is Jason, and it's most likely a pleasure to meet you. Now on to my main message.

Just in case you haven't had your fill of pictures yet, I present you with ones I have taken so far. If you have had your fill of pictures I would suggest you close the window now. With the exception of the last photo, I took all these on day one of sanding.About a couple hours into sanding the first door.

Blake Joined and the work speed increased..a little bit
Finally the door is ready to primer
Ahh I Remember the good old days when we believed
we could rattle can primer the car.
A freshly primered door was the reward for the day's hard work. A bonus reward is when we get to sand it back down and spray it with good primer. At least that wont take nearly as long to re-sand.

You may be wondering why I mentioned the Oscillator in the title when all I have been showing is other pictures. In a few seconds you will wonder no longer. I present to you the Oscillating Disc Sander!!

This particular machine spun at two different points so that it could quickly and evenly sand the area it was pressed against. We thank Mr. Hampton for both his great advice and his sweet tools. Odds are this wont be the last time the Oscillator makes an appearance in this epic saga.

Some Additional Photos for Your Viewing Pleasure

Alrighty, then. Some of these pictures may be a bit redundant but I thought that I ought to add them anyway. Plus I came up with this really awesome angled staircase inspired layout which I am sure you will all appreciate.



This here is the first door we worked on after it had been sanded and masked.



And down below is a side by side comparison after it was primed.

And finally, the first primed door in all of its glory mounted back upon its only slightly cracked hinges.


This almost completely unrelated photo shows only a taste of the trials through which we have been put through thus far. After priming the second door, J.J. and I had to put it back on the Pig in the rain to avoid extreme water damage. You can see what it cost us.

Preservation of Perfection

Today (10/2) Mr. Bundy once again graced the grounds of Aloha with his presence. This allowed he and Team Awesome to participate in a Team Meeting. In which we decided that this Saturday we will be setting up shop at Bundy's dwelling and striving to complete the priming process (the correct way) for all four of the doors. This will require the re-sanding of the one door we already 'primed'. Also, it will require the sanding of the front two doors. The real stickler is the door we just sanded down. We couldn't just hold on to it until Saturday because it would begin rusting thanks to the exposed metal. Also, Mr. Bundy was hoping we would be able to put it back on his car as soon as possible due to the predicted forecast of torrential downpour until the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse decide they're tired of being menacing and sit down for a cup of tea. To appease both problems, we decided to go ahead and prime the door with the cheap primer. This would at least slow down the rust and allow us to put it back on to the Pig so Mr. Bundy doesn't freeze to death. Besides, now it'll be symetrical! Awesome.

To accomplish this, Greg followed me over to my dad's house afterschool today (10/2). When we got here we started taping off the door and getting it ready for priming. We cleaned it one final time to clear all of the sanding dust and particles that had settled on it. After we were satisfied with the gleam of the colors of a melted Christmas tree, we went to work priming it. We had originally intended only to spot prime it, but decided that looked dumb, and that we might as well just finish it out. Thus, a second gray door has come to be. I've also decided to try and take more pictures, because that just makes everything more fun. As I'm writing this we're waiting for the primer to dry so that we can load it into Greg's car to take to reattatch at rehersal tonight. Heil Ceasar!

Pleasant Surprise

To the irreconcilable dismay of Team Awesome, Mr. Bundy was not at school today (10/1). This meant that we wouldn't be able to hold our planned meeting to discuss the method with which we would circumnavigate the primer issue. Luckily, my infallible memory left nothing to be desired as I recited back the phone number of the paint shop we looked up yesterday (9/30). Jason provided me with the use of his phone, and I placed what would soon be one of the most glorious phone calls I have ever made.

I reached one of the employees and explained that I had a few questions. I informed them that we were planning on stripping an old Toyota Land Cruiser (roughly the size of a modern Tahoe) and that we were in need of a quality primer. I mentioned that we were probably looking for a high-mid range quality primer, and he had just the product in mind. KD2000 or something like that. He said they sold it by the gallon for just over a hundred dollars. This had me scared. We were spending about 5 dollars a can on the rattle can, this was going to cost a fortune, or so I thought. I asked him for a rough estimate of what it would cost us to coat the whole car in that primer. He asked me to hold on for a minute and I heard a lot of buttons being pushed. That got me scared. A minute or two later he came back on the phone and informed me that along with the quart of activator the primer required, we were looking at a total cost of around one hundred and thirty five dollars.

I was absolutely dumbfounded. I even checked to make sure that he was talking about painting the whole car, not just a door or two, and he sounded certain that it would do the job with primer to spare. When I told the rest of Team Awesome they were all as amazed as I was. It was really exciting news to hear that we were going to be able to paint it the way it should be done, and with the correct materials, for much less than we thought it would be. In the words of Michael Suskin, I think we all peed our pants a little. Full speed ahead!