Can you believe we are approaching six years since I started Project Why Wait? I can barely do it and I did it. But at the start of 2021, it feels like the end is finally coming into focus.
To help rekindle a fire within the project, Jeff Wybrow and I hatched a plan to bring Project Why Wait to his shop. IssyFab Speed and Engineering This June.
Jeff will finish wiring and firing the truck along with a few other drivability issues that his shop specializes in. While the #siegmc gone, I’m going to bring my bed from the backyard and start the needed metal repair and finishing there.
The truck will also make a small trip to the body shop overseas, but we’ll cover those plans in another article. Before the truck leaves though, I need to take care of the list you saw at the top of this article.
Although it sometimes looks quite complete, a large part of the truck has just been “assembled”. Several elements required coating, tightening, painting, etc. to be truly checked as complete.
This includes the back half, which when last checked looked like this:
Quite “close”, but obviously the masking tape, protective plastic and uncoated Airlift Performance tanks had to go. I went back and forth on the color to do the reservoirs. I struggled around a contrasting color, but the most
The simplest, but the most obvious.
Color chosen, my next small obstacle was the coating. I wanted something that wasn’t too shiny or chunky but a more natural finish to match the air compressors. After seeing a few items made in Cerakote at GT Custom Exhaust Oshawa, I decided to give it a try.
If you are unfamiliar, Cerakote is a ceramic finish. It is much thinner than powder coating, but still provides abrasion/wear resistance, chemical protection and is generally harder than paint.
Here in Durham Region Ontario Red Tower Armory is the leader in ceramic coatings. If it needs a coating, they probably have it. And if you’re not sure if it needs a coating, they’ll help you decide how and what it needs.
My tanks being pretty low on the complexity scale of the work they did, they just knocked it out of the park.
There are also a few other items they made for me hanging in my garage. But we’ll get to that later when I put the interior together.
The tanks are now black, but the grain of the aluminum is still visible, as are the welds and all the Air Lift craftsmanship originally put into the parts.
More importantly, it looks great next to all the other black components. The RCI fuel cell, Viair compressors and brake lines. Also, to note, in these photos, the chassis is almost fully wired.
The rear chassis main harness has been routed through the frame, in addition to the Airlift main harness routed through this post from 2018.
Since the photos above, I’ve been in the garage at least three nights a week pulling items off my list. Mid-June is in about thirty days and I have a lot of work to do!
As always, follow me on Instagram for shorter progress updates as I go along.
