Tag 1985 Ford F-150

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. About a month ago, I had a comment on one of my videos telling me that my truck was screaming for a buff and a polish. Well, who am I to deny the screaming requests of my truck? Today, I will be starting the process of giving this truck a good thorough cleaning and then a good thorough buffing. Now, I don’t plan to do the last stage of polish. This truck has really old paint, and this paint’s going to be replaced and repainted at some point, so I’m not too worried about this. Actually, this is really sort of a test for me, a learning experience. I’ve never buffed a vehicle before. Like a lot of the things on my channel, I’ve never done this, so this should be interesting.

But the first thing I’m going to do is give her a good cleaning. I’ve got a pressure washer here behind me, so we’re going to use some McGuire’s Gold Class soap and my pressure washer to get it all washed down. And then once that’s—the basic heavy-duty grime is washed down, I’m going to give it a hand washing. Once the hand washing is done, I’m going to do a clay bar on it. Um, actually, before all that’s done, before the clay bar, then I got to go through and get rid of some of this peeling clear coat. I got peeling clear coat everywhere, so I need to get underneath that and sort of get that back to a good line between the old paint and the clear coat. I’m not going to worry about sanding off the old clear coat or anything like that. We’re just doing this as is. We’re going to see how it turns out. I mean, no matter what, it’s got to be better than what it is because this paint is really, really bad.

So after the clay bar, then I will get my buffer polisher out, and we will use some McGuire’s Ultimate Compound and some different levels of buffing pads to see what we can do to this old paint. Once that’s all done, I’ve got some ceramic coating that I bought just to see how that works. A lot of this stuff is just me testing things out so that once I do get the real final finish on this truck, I know exactly what sort of products that I want to use. So I’m really interested to see exactly how this turns out. Like I said, it’s got to make the truck look better, no matter what, basically, unless I take all the paint off. But hey, you know, even then, I get it down to metal, clear coat it, and call it patina.

All right, so let’s get to washing. So before I continue, there are a few things that I’d like to talk about or point out. For one, I’m really washing this truck at the wrong time of day. I’m in an actual middle of the day. The sun is at the highest in the sky that it could be, and I did have some problem with the soap drying before I could get the rinse coat on there. But I’m not too worried about that because I’m gonna do a hand wash on this anyway and get some of the stuff the pressure washer didn’t because I didn’t want to get too close to the pressure washer.

The other thing is that this hood has some really thin paint on it. There’s a lot of places, actually, where the metal is coming through. So if I were somewhere else in the country, I would probably clear coat this hood. I would sand the clear coat that’s already on here. There’s a little thin strip of clear coat on the front of this. I would probably sand this clear coat back to make it nice and even with the paint and then sort of, you know, feather it in and then probably get some of that same 2K clear rattle can stuff that I had before and just tape things off and do a real quick clear coat on the top of this just to seal in all that exposed metal. Because I’m in the southwest, rust really isn’t a thing down here. I mean, it is, but it takes a long, long time, and I’m going to repaint this thing well before I have any problems with rust eating through the hood.

And on top of that, I’m not even sure that this is the hood that I’m going to keep going forward. I may want to get a hood with a scoop or some other stuff. Hoods are relatively inexpensive, especially if you can, you know, go into a pick apart or something. So the hood is the least of my worries. It’s the other body panels that I’ll be worried about, and all the other body panels are good. There’s a few chips, but for the most part, the paint is pretty good on those and nice and thick, so I’m not real worried about that. I did get an ultra-fine buffing pad for the hood specifically just to make sure that I don’t take off any more paint than I have to. I do expect—see, I’m getting red on my fingers just doing that. So, um, yeah, this paint is really ultra-thin and is going to come up super easy, so that’s why I got an ultra-thin pad for this.

So anyway, I just wanted to get that stuff out there. I’m going to do a hand wash on this probably later this afternoon once the sun gets a little bit lower and the weather or the temperature starts to drop a little bit. That way, my water doesn’t dry quite as fast. I’ve got a little bit more time to actually do the hand wash. Once the hand wash is done, I’m going to get her into the garage so that the crazy amount of dust in this New Mexico air doesn’t fall on the truck while it’s sitting outside. And then I’ve got time over the course of the next week or so to do my clay bar, to do my buffing, and all that fun stuff. So I know that was a long explanation, but I just want to let you guys know exactly what my plans are, what I’m doing, and you know, that way I don’t have to do a voiceover later, which is kind of a pain in the butt.

Okay guys, before I start doing this, I want to give you a little tour of the paint on this hood. Now you can see here where the clear coat is delaminating, and then along these front quarter panels also, it’s delaminating. And then front up here on the hood. And so this portion is going to be an issue, but I’m not too worried about it. What I’m worried about is things like this. Um, this, of course, is bare metal. And now, like I said before, I’m not too worried about it rusting, but you can see here where I actually painted over it with something just to keep the bare metal from being exposed. Um, I didn’t bother to do that over here because I think that looks ugly. I wasn’t gonna do it again anyway. Um, what I’m really kind of worried about is like this. Okay, now this is not—I haven’t buffed this. Um, I haven’t done anything to it. This is simply what’s come about as a result of me giving it a good wash. I haven’t clay barred yet. I haven’t really done much of anything to it yet. And here you can see some more of the clear coat delamination. There’s also a spot over here where it’s starting to do the same kind of thing. So it’s going to be really interesting to see what happens to this hood when I buff it. I am still planning on using the buffer on this hood because I want to find out what happens to these spots when you buff them. And I’m sure that a good detailer or body man could tell me exactly what’s going to happen, but I learn by doing, and so that’s what I’m going to do.

My next major task is going to be the clay bar of the truck because this paint has a lot of really rough spots. I can feel it. And before I buff it, I want to make sure that it’s as clean as I can possibly get it. But before I can even do that, I need to take care of these little areas here where you can see the clear coat is coming off. Now, I’m not going to worry about sanding or blending or doing anything like that. I just want to get as much of this little flakiness off as possible. So what I’m going to use is actually a paint brush. This is a new paint brush, and if you run it along, you can see it’s kind of bringing this back right to the edge here and removing a lot of the flakiness. And I’ll have to go back over this real quick just to get all these little bits and pieces. Anything that this doesn’t pick up, I will just run over with the clay bar and then eventually hit with the buffer. But there’s a lot of this on the truck, but you can see where that’s actually doing its job. It’s not going to be perfect. This is really old paint, really old clear coat. But if I can get some of these chips off of here, that’s one less thing to snag on the clay bar and one less thing to deal with when I’m actually doing the buffing. And it should make it easier for me to sort of buff blend, if that’s even a term, these little delaminations here so that they’re not quite as obvious. As you can see, there’s a whole line here that needs the same treatment done to it. So we are going to go ahead and do that. Uh, so that works pretty good. Yeah, I’m going to run through this a couple more times, hit it with a microfiber towel to get some of these little flecks and stuff off the panel here, and then I will go do the rest of the truck. Mostly it’s just around the front and on the hood. Um, and then we’ll be back to start the clay bar.

Now I got a Mother’s California Gold clay bar kit. It comes with everything you see here. This is the lubricant, a couple of bars of clay, and a microfiber towel to rinse things off or wipe things off when you’re all done. Now I am not going to use this entire bar of clay. I’m going to open this up and divide it probably into two different pieces. That way, if something happens—I mean, if you drop one of these on the floor, it’s garbage, so you got to throw it away. So, and then, of course, once it gets full of garbage and crap, which these will because my truck probably hasn’t been washed in 20 years, then you got to throw it away then too. So I’m probably going to split both of these bars into two pieces right down the middle, and that should give me plenty of clay to do what I got to do, but also give me a spare piece. I’m hoping I could do the whole truck with just one bar. If not, I have a second one, so we’ll see how it goes.

So quick update, here is the truck after being clayed all the way around. You can clearly see on the hood there I’ve lost a little bit more paint. It was easy to see on the bottom of the clay bar that that paint was coming up. But again, the hood is my biggest concern. You can see here, especially on the ridge, where some more of the red paint has come up. And then over here, so red paint has come up there. So what I’m going to do is when I buff this hood, I’m going to tape off these ridges with masking tape and this one and this one. And then I’m going to hand buff these ridges, and they won’t get nearly as shiny, but hopefully that’ll help protect some of that paint. So that’s my hope.

So here’s the rest of the truck. It looks much better than it did. You can actually see some reflection in these back panels. I have not buffed this yet. This is just cleaning and clay bar, so there is no clear coat on this paint here. I think this is just single-stage paint in the back. I’m not sure what they did to this truck. Clearly, those front quarter panels are two-stage. There’s a base coat and a clear coat, and then these back parts of the truck are single-stage. So I’m not sure who repainted it and when and how and all that stuff, but there’s been some paint work done to it. But it does look way better than it did. So when I buff, I’m going to start with the bed because that’s where the paint is the thickest. The old paint is there, and there’s a few scratches and stuff, but it’s an old truck, so there’s going to be. So the bed is where the paint is the thickest, so I’m gonna go ahead, since I’ve never done any buffing, power buffing before, I’m gonna start back there. That’ll give me the most leeway and get me used to the feel of the buffer before I go up front and do the hood. So that’s what’s next.

A few things here before I get started. I’m going to start with this panel here. It’s relatively simple. It’s relatively flat in comparison to the rest of the stuff on the truck. I’m going to sort of cut my teeth, so to speak, since I’ve never done this before, on a pretty simple panel. Now I’ve got this panel all taped up. You want to tape up anything that you don’t want the buffer to touch, so my chrome—this chrome bar up here—and I’ve also taped off the fuel door because it’s got some sharp edges, and I don’t want to run the buffer over top of these sharp edges and remove more paint than I’d like to.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to come at this at angles like this and not back so I don’t hit this edge here going back this way. It turns out that a lot of the preparation I did here didn’t make any difference. I wasn’t using a strong enough buffing pad or compound to cause the kinds of issues I’m talking about, at least not on the bed of the truck. I even ended up using my old buffing pads on the chrome when I was done since the Ultimate Compound and the buffer made the chrome parts shine up really nice. And I’ll always try to come at it like this, and then when I’m done, I get the whole panel done, then I’ll come back and take the tape off of this door and tape around here, close the door back up, and then I’ll buff the door just that little bit. I may actually just buff this door by hand rather than use the power buffer.

So what I have is this Tacklife rotary buffer. I picked this up from Amazon. It’s got a digital readout on it, and it’s got really good reviews, so we’re gonna see how well it works. And I’ve also got these seven-inch Bauer foam pads I got from Harbor Freight. I’m using yellow for the entire truck except for the hood. For the hood, I’m using white because white is sort of an ultra-fine. It should do a lot less cutting than the yellow does. The yellow is just a little bit harsher than what the white is, so I can be a little bit more aggressive on this paint, but it’s nowhere near as aggressive as I can get. Again, this is my first time. I’m not going for a show-quality finish, far from it. I’m going for better than it was, so hopefully I can get to that by doing this. I’m using McGuire’s Ultimate Compound because supposedly it kind of does everything all in one compound. Again, not going for a show-quality finish. I’m going for an Ed in his garage better than it was before finish, so hopefully this works out fine for me.

Along with the yellow buffing pad, we’re gonna find out because I’m about to kick this thing off, so we shall see. So, so, so, real quick, let’s take a look at this. Obviously, this is where I have buffed, and this is where I have not. And I haven’t spent a whole lot of time on this. I’ve just gone over it once. You can see, um, if I get real close into here—actually, it’s kind of hard to see on the camera. There we go. You can see scratches and stuff that exists in there. Man, this is 30-year-old paint. This is 30-year-old paint, so there’s gonna be scratches and stuff. I’m pretty happy with how this is turning out. I’m trying to be real gentle with it, so I’m not being real aggressive. I’m not putting hardly any pressure on it at all, and this is really buffing out nice, so we’re just going to keep going.

So, so, if my goal for this truck was to make it better than it was, then I think it’s pretty obvious that I have met that goal and actually, at the very least, met and maybe even exceeded my expectations for my first time ever doing this. Now, I could probably get better than this. In fact, I know I could. But for, you know, Ed in his garage doing this for the first time ever, I’m pretty happy now. I don’t know if you can see over here what it used to look like because I haven’t done any of the cab stuff yet, but this is way shinier than that. And as a matter of fact, if I back up, I can see myself in the finish here, whereas over here on this side, if I’m looking straight on, I can’t see anything like that. Now, I don’t know that I could actually—I can actually shave in there. Maybe like if it was the apocalypse and there were no mirrors available anywhere, I could probably get away with it. But, uh, the bottom line is that I’m really happy with it.

Now I’ve got to do the rest of the truck, and I am not going to bore you by having you watch me buff the whole rest of the truck. But I am going to bring you back when I do the front quarter panel, one of the front corner panels and the hood because those are the other areas on this truck that are sort of special consideration. So the front quarter panel has a line where the clear coat meets the base coat, and I want to try to see if I can feather that line out a little bit to make it as nice looking as possible. And then, of course, the hood has really, really thin paint, and so I’m really interested to see just how much of that paint I’m going to take off and what that hood’s going to look like when I’m done. And I’m going to do the hood last. That way I get as much practice on the thicker paint of the rest of the truck as I can before I tackle the hood. So I will bring you back when I am doing the front quarter panel.

Okay, so I looked. I will make you watch me buff this door. I’m just so impressed by the difference it makes. And I think looking straight on as I buff out the door really showcases just how quickly I go from dull paint to shiny paint. Remember, this door is as clean as I could make it with hand washing and clay bar. It’s not like I’m just wiping off dirt here. I’m actually restoring the shine on this 35-year-old paint. I said I was going to bring you back when I’m ready to do the quarter panels and the hood, and here we are. I’ve actually already done the other quarter panel on the other side just to get a pretty good idea of how it’s going to go and how it’s going to look. It turned out pretty good, not perfect, but it’s not going to be, so I’m happy with it.

There’s a couple of things that I want to note before I go forward. So I’ve done the rest of the truck, and I found that on this older single-stage paint, 1800 RPM, which is the third highest setting on my polisher, works much better than 1400. It just sort of does a better job, does it quicker, and this paint is pretty robust, so it’s not really digging in too much. I’m not having a real hard time with my edges or anything like that, especially with the polishing pad that I’ve got, which is not real aggressive. I probably could have got a much more aggressive pad and done this a lot quicker and easier, but I’m trying to be cautious because I’ve never done this before. And to be honest, it’s turned out really, really well. The quarter panel on the other side, the clear coat obviously looks fantastic, and this base coat underneath shines a little bit, but it’s not gonna shine like the clear coat does. So, uh, these base coats aren’t really designed to be polished. They’re designed to be covered with a clear coat. You can polish them, and they do shine up, but one thing that you want to be careful of is that these are way thinner under this clear coat than this old single-stage paint is. You’ve got a lot of paint here. It’s real thick that you can go through before you start hitting any kind of primer or metal or anything else, whereas this base coat here, it doesn’t take a whole lot of time, even with a light grit pad and some fairly mild compound, to get down to where you’re starting to get into the primer underneath. And in fact, I did that on the other side, just a small little piece. You’ll never even know it’s there unless you know what you’re looking for, but that’s something to be careful of when you’re doing blending like I’m gonna be doing between clear coat and base coat.

Other than that, I’m gonna turn the machine back down to 1400 RPM for this, so it’s not quite as aggressive, and let’s just see what I’m doing. I’ve also found that using an applicator pad like this to put down your initial coat of compound works really well to prevent the machine, the polisher, from splattering compound all over the place. So I’ve been using this just to get my base sort of layer of compound on the paint and then coming back behind it with the polisher to polish it up. Now it actually looks much better on camera than it does in person, but really it doesn’t look bad. You can clearly see the old area that I have not yet buffed versus the area that I just got done buffing, and if you look pretty close, you can see the line where the clear coat ends and the base coat begins. But if you stand far enough away, it’s really kind of hard to see. It almost just looks like I’ve got a strip of matte paint going across the top when you step back away from it. Overall, I’m pretty happy with that.

So I’m going to go ahead and finish this panel, and then I’m going to do the cowl and the top part of the roof, and then we will move on to the hood, which is going to be one of the most interesting parts. I’ve got the hood sectioned off like this so that I can do one part at a time, really sort of pay attention to what I’m doing, and also because these ridges are a spot where the polisher will eat into the paint the most because that’s where the most pressure is going to be applied. And a lot of these ridges actually already have some paint missing, so I don’t want to grind into these too hard. Once I’m done with the whole thing, I’ll take this tape off, and I’ll do these by hand. So I’m using about the finest pad that I can. It’s this white pad from Harbor Freight, and I’m going to be on 1400 RPM, which is the second lowest setting, just to try to make sure that I can get some cutting done, but not too much, again, not to take off too much of this paint. So we’re going to go ahead and lay our compound down and get the buffing.

So, so, bye. Mmm, well, it’s far from perfect, but considering how careful I’m trying to be not to eat into this paint, I think it’s as good as I’m gonna get. And I think once I get a coat of the ceramic on here to protect it, no matter what, it will definitely look better than it did. So, well, the hood’s done, and as you can see, it’s better but not great. And I don’t know what I could do to make it look better. The paint here is really thin. I don’t know how much correction I could do to this to sort of shine it up or gloss it up. I could clear coat it, but I don’t know if clear coating it would make it look a lot better because I would just be clear coating over a lot of these paint defects and splotchiness and that kind of stuff. Um, you know, I could have used a more aggressive pad and probably got a more uniform look, and I’m sure that you can tell looking at that there’s splotchiness and sort of weirdness all over it as far as the paint goes. But I’m afraid that if I would have used a more aggressive pad or a more aggressive setting on the polisher that I just would have started really eating into the paint. And you can see, I’m not sure you can see from the angle that you’re at, but I think you can see it from the angle with giraffe before. There are some darker spots on this hood, and that’s actually where I’m getting down into, um, you know, the primer or maybe even the previous paint. I mean, who knows? This could have been painted black at some point, and there’s some other kind of paint coming through here.

So, I mean, interestingly enough, I know that this cowl isn’t original to the truck because this pinhole cowl is on the next generation of truck from ’87 to ’91. So at some point, this cowl was replaced, and I’m guessing that at some point maybe this entire front part of the truck was replaced because this front part, the two quarter panels of the hood and the cowl are the only parts that have clear coat. So the rest of the truck may very well be original, and these parts may be added on from another truck. Now, I mean, obviously, they’re bull-nosed parts because the wheel wells, you know, have the bullnose shape to them, and of course, the hood has to be able in those hoods. So, um, I don’t know what happened in the history of this truck, but something happened to where these parts were coated and the rest of the truck was not.

Anyway, back on topic here. So, um, the hood definitely looks better, but I’m not super happy with it. So I think we’re gonna do something else to it. Um, I’ve already got a paint sprayer on the way, and I think I’m gonna plasti dip the hood just probably satin black, maybe put some glossifier on there. I’m not sure yet. Um, you know, I thought about maybe even now once this truck is sort of done and fully painted that I might use plasti dip for the two-tone or maybe a wrap or something else. I don’t know yet, but I do know that I’ve never plaster dipped anything before. Sounds like fun. Should be interesting. Looking forward to doing that and then, of course, making a video on it.

So the next thing that we’re gonna do is get all this tape off the truck, get it all wiped down, nice clean cloth all the way around every single surface, get nice and wiped down, and then I’m going to put a ceramic coating on all this so that it stays nice and clean and sealed. So that’s next. Oh, by the way, I’m sure that you can see this right here, this swirl mark. Yeah, that wasn’t done by me. Okay, what that is is I had one of these guys, you know, these guys that come door to door, and they try to sell you this cleaner junk, right? And they try to get you to buy all these big bottles of their super magical wonderful cleaner. And this guy had the nerve to walk over to this truck and get a rag out and spray some of his cleaner on the rag and start grinding it into the truck to show me how amazingly it cleans. Yeah, yeah, I was not very happy with that guy. But obviously, the cleaner works fairly well because even after buffing, I still can’t get the crap that he cleaned the marks off the hood. Jerk.

The entire truck paint-wise has been buffed. I’ve gone around and polished the chrome and other little metal bits, and I’ve also cleaned my windows, which is pretty everyday simple stuff. I’m not going to bore you with. The last thing that I’m going to do for this video is I’m going to spray on this ceramic spray coating. So ceramic coatings are relatively new. Typically, in the olden days, you would put on a coat of wax, and a lot of people still do put on wax. And as a matter of fact, um, I’ve never used a ceramic coating like this before. So, um, I say that a lot, right? Like I’ve never done this before. Let’s do it for the first time ever on camera on YouTube. So, but that’s, I guess, what my channel is about. So, um, this is a Turtle Wax Hybrid Solutions ceramic spray coating, and I’m using this because Project Farm actually did a sort of a test of a whole bunch of different ceramic coatings, and this stuff came out pretty close to the top. So, I will link that video in the little card or something somewhere. You should go check that out. It’s a pretty cool video. He does a really great job on this stuff.

But anyway, it’s pretty simple. All you’ve got to do is wipe everything down. So sometimes the polish or the compound leaves a little bit of a residue, and I have gone over the truck already with a cloth after I was done, but I’m gonna go over it one more time real thoroughly with just a real clean microfiber cloth just to make sure I got everything off. And then once that’s done, um, you’re supposed to spray two shots of this on every panel. Um, but I’m—it doesn’t really say what a panel is. I’m guessing a panel is probably like that sort of an area. So we’ll do two good shots of that, and then I got this little applicator that I’ll use to rub it on there and do the whole truck that way. And that should serve as a replacement for a wax coating, and this stuff is supposed to last for like about a year if you do two coats. So that’s what we’re gonna do, and hopefully, um, it’ll last that long. We’ll see how long this paint job is—this polish job, anyway—is it gonna last. So let’s get to it. This is the boring part right here.

Now the bottle says once you’ve got one coat applied, you should dry it with a microfiber towel, so that’s what I’m doing. The bottle also says that for 12-month protection, you should apply a second coat, but it does not say how long you should wait between coats or anything like that. Mm-hmm, yeah, no information about that. So I am just going to go ahead and put my second coat on now so that I can say this panel is done. Uh, it already looks really good. It feels super smooth. So, but while we’re here and I’ve got the stuff, we’re gonna put a second coat on to give me as much protection as possible. So let’s do that.

All right, well, there’s one panel completely done and the entire rest of the truck to go, so I will do that and see you on the other side.

Do do do, here we are with the final product, and I gotta say I think it looks pretty good. That’s not a professional job, but I think it’s probably a pretty solid, pretty solid amateur job, you know, for a couple of weeks’ worth of work—washing, clay, buffing, and then putting some ceramic on top. I think it definitely makes a big difference. Now this paint is never gonna be perfect. I can look at it right now and see lots of little tiny scratches, some haze areas where the paint has just been worn away. And, uh, you know, that’s what you get for a 35-year-old paint job. At least in the back part here where this is the old single-stage stuff. And, uh, you know, you’re never gonna, without some serious correction, make it perfect. And I am in no position in terms of my time or my experience level to do any serious correction on this truck, but I am again real happy with this.

If you’ve got an older vehicle that’s got some oxidation on the paint, um, that just needs a little bit of a refresher, especially if it’s got this old single-stage stuff on it, uh, you know, a buffer and some buffing pads and a little bit of compound will really just bring the shine right back out, and I highly recommend that. You know, I’m really happy that that guy on YouTube was like, ‘Ah, this truck is screaming for a buff and a polish,’ because I, you know, I think it was right.

The other thing to talk about real quick is this hood and the top of these quarter panels. Now I’m not sure if you can see it from where you are, but there’s definitely a demarcation line where the clear coat on this quarter panel ends and the base coat begins. But in terms of color, they’re very similar. It’s just sort of the shine. So the top of this looks kind of matte, and of course, the bottom looks glossy. As you get back far enough, I mean, yeah, you can see it, but it doesn’t jump out at you like it did before, so I’m really happy with that.

This hood is another story because it’s not just about the clear coat of the shine of the hood. The paint on this hood is actually really pretty badly damaged, and there’s a lot of places where the metal is coming through, and it’s just kind of ratty. So no amount of paint correction with a buffer is going to fix that, which is why I’ve decided to plasti dip this hood. I figure the hood will be a really good practice ground for some plastic dip practice. I’m planning on plasti dipping parts of my other truck because it’s having the same problem with the clear coat peeling, and I think plasti dip is an easy and sort of undamaging way to make that look much better without having to go through the whole thing of, you know, sanding and painting and all that stuff. So, I mean, you have to do some feathering and stuff to eat the plasti dip to stick, but that’s a whole other thing. Well, we’ll cover that in that video where I’ll either make it look a whole lot better or we’ll turn it into a gigantic debacle, which could also be fun.

So bottom line, glad I did it. Looks way better. And, uh, until next time, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, guys. We will see you next time. Oh, that was terrible. Thanks for watching, guys. We will see you next time.

Hey guys, just thought I’d give you a real quick update on the condition of the truck and, uh, kind of how things are holding up after a few years. Uh, I still try to drive it every, uh, now probably about once or twice a month. Um, sometimes I drive it two or three times or five times a week just because my other truck’s in service or something else. So, uh, but yeah, it gets a fair bit of use and, uh, you know, it does pretty well.

So I just kind of wanted to, you know, it’s been about three years since I’ve done any real video work on it. Um, things like the bus in paint or, yeah, the buff job that I did and the, uh, uh, the white on the tires. Thought I’d just kind of give you an update as to how the stuff looks. So take a look. Hello.

All right, so let’s start with the wheels and the tires, specifically the white on the tires. Now, I don’t know if you guys saw my previous video where I actually did this with a white paint pen. Uh, I actually tried some white actual paint, but it didn’t work out very well. Uh, the paint pens seem to work the best. And so I’ll just go around and give you guys, uh, a quick tour. Now it’s been about, uh, two and a half or three years since I did that work to it and, uh, you should note that I haven’t really washed it in that time. Uh, this is a once or twice a month driver basically and, uh, I haven’t gone through any car washes. I haven’t done any tire cleaning, anything like that. Um, so basically just, uh, having it sit out in the elements. Now it is here in New Mexico, so there’s a lot of UV, um, a lot of really hot days. Uh, and you can see where, you know, like, like right in there in the r, there’s some spots and an O where the paint’s kind of coming out. But, you know, um, I think it actually looks really good for being three years old. I still have the paint pens in the garage. It wouldn’t take me very long to touch this up. Um, I’m actually really happy with how well it’s held up over the course of the last few years. So yeah, I think it looks really, really nice. Again, I’ll go over the other side and kind of show you them. This is the side that kind of gets more sun generally throughout the year. I started out putting, uh, wheel and tire covers on it, but I stopped doing that ’cause it’s just kind of a pain. So, but yeah, I mean, there’s a nice kind of closeup look. I mean, when you get real close, it looks ugly, right? But if you’re far enough away, like, you know, you’re with me driving on the road, it looks pretty good, you know, especially against those black tires with black rims. I mean, it looks nice this far away. So yeah, pretty happy with that, pretty happy with how well it’s worn up, uh, hold up, held up. BL.

Now, like I said, I haven’t done a lot of washing, so I don’t know what this would be like if I, if I’d gone through automatic car washes or, uh, done a lot of, uh, wheel and tire cleaning over the last few years. But, um, again, just sitting there kind of out in the sun every day, I think it’s, uh, pretty good.

All right, and now for the obvious update, which is the paint. Uh, you can see that there’s quite a bit more flaking going on now than there was. Um, I actually had a, I hate myself sometimes, I actually had a toolbox roll down the driveway and scrape against this right there. Um, you know, sometimes that happens, you’re not paying attention. It’s a, not really, but you know, but you can see that, you know, there’s some more flaking going on there and, uh, you know, some thinking going on there, a little bit of, uh, rust type stuff coming through there. Um, yeah, so the, the, uh, the buffing that I did with the, uh, trying to, yeah, you can, oh, here is, here’s a good, you can see where I, I had the, the buff go to before and now where the, the clear coat is continuing to flake away even more than it was before. You know, that’s just time, guys. This clear coat is just, it’s at the end of its life and, uh, there’s not much you can do about that, you know, except for sand it all down and repaint it. So the buffing gave me a few good months of it looking nice, um, and then it kind of went back to, to the way that it was. So, um, and this stuff back here is, is back to being really dull. It would not take much to, to sort of re-bring this out, but again, you can see here where this is actually some paint degradation here. So, uh, yeah, but as I’ve said several times, repainting this truck is in the cards, so I’m, I’m not too worried about it. It’s, it’s interesting to see the result after a few years of, uh, basically neglect. I, I don’t, I take care of the truck mechanically. I don’t really wash it very often. Um, it’s kind of a, uh, you know, backup vehicle for us right now. So once I get a nice new paint job on there, I mean, I’m, I’ll take care of that and keep it in the garage, but I’m, I’m not in that point yet. So yeah, I mean, that’s what it looks like after being out in the elements for, for three years.

All right, well there you go, guys. There’s the, uh, condition update on the Bullnose. Um, it’s again mechanically, it’s in great shape. Uh, visually it’s seen better days, but it’s not too bad, I think, considering its age and, and my lack of care over the course of the last couple years, visually anyway. Uh, you know, but I think the, the, uh, the tire lettering is a real win. Um, the buffing was a win for a while and it didn’t take very long for that to, uh, sort of go back to the way that it was before. But again, um, I learned a lot from that experience. If you guys haven’t seen those videos, go check them out, uh, where I, I, I sort of buff and shine this, this truck up and make it look way, way nicer. It was real nice for a couple of months and, um, again where I, uh, the video where I do the, the tire lettering, uh, it’s super simple to do. It takes a while ’cause it’s, it’s a pain to sit down and, and outline all the letters with pen, but, uh, I think, I think that the result is worth it. Um, so I would definitely do it again. As a matter of fact, I will probably go back and do these again at some point, uh, when I clean the truck up again, you know, at some point in the next five or ten years. Uh, yeah, so all right, uh, thanks again for watching, guys. We will see you next time.

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage for part three of the Bullnose brake job special. Today, hopefully, we’ll be wrapping up with the front brakes. So, I’ve got new hubs, new rotors—actually, it’s one piece hub and rotor—new calipers, new pads, new wheel bearings, the whole nine yards up here. Should be fun getting dirty, packing these bearings, and getting everything back together. So stay tuned.

Just like in the back of the truck, the first thing we’ve got to do is some disassembly. We’re going to start with the brake caliper since that’s the first piece that has to come off to replace anything here. Now, normally when you take off a brake caliper, you would just remove it and then hang it somewhere so the brake line doesn’t get kinked up. A lot of guys use bungee cords or, you know, wire hangers or something like that. But since I’m gonna actually be replacing the entire caliper, I’ve got to remove the brake line completely. So that’s where we’re going to start. This is a 9/16.

Something to note about disconnecting a caliper from a brake line versus a wheel or brake cylinder from a brake line is that there’s not an easy way to cap this connection. The way this works is that this bolt goes through here, actually goes that way, and there’s a hole in the bolt for the brake line or the brake fluid to go through, and then it comes out the end. So when you remove this, that connection inside of here is just open, and there’s not really a good way to plug it. Now, maybe they make something to do that, I don’t know. I’m not familiar with anything, so I just have a bucket here for all the brake fluid to drip into.

On these Bullnose trucks, the calipers are mounted in a sort of unique way, and I’m not sure what all vehicles this mounting system is used on. It’s the first time actually that I’ve ever seen something like this. But there’s this little assembly down here with actually like a little spring in here that pushes the caliper up into this plate, and there’s a plate up top here, like a groove that the caliper slides into. And so this assembly here actually has a spring that holds it in place with tension. So you have to remove this bolt and then pound out this assembly, and I’m just going to use a regular pin punch for that. Just like with the brake line, this is a 9/16.

And there’s the assembly with the spring. There’s not too much to it, and actually with the calipers that I purchased, I got a new set of these, so I actually don’t need to keep these, so they’re going to go in the garbage. And now the caliper should just come off, rotate out, lift up, and slide off just like that. There’s some brake fluid still in there, and of course the pads slide right out of the caliper. You can toss those. This pad here is actually stuck to the back of the rotor here assembly. There we go, that pad comes out.

Now, these calipers can actually be sent back for a core charge. Usually, when you buy a brand new caliper, you’re usually charged a core charge anywhere from five dollars to maybe fifteen depending on where you buy them. And then if you want that core charge back, you send your old caliper to whoever you purchased your new caliper from. I bought my new calipers from Rock Auto, and the core charge is only like five dollars, so I’m not even sure it’s worth the money to send these back. I’m probably just going to go ahead and pitch them.

Now that the caliper is off, the next job is to remove the rotor and hub assembly, and to do that, I’ve got to get this cap here off the front. There’s a couple of different ways to do this. I’m going to show you what I think is the right way to do it, which is just putting a little screwdriver in here and peeling it off little by little. These caps aren’t terribly expensive, but if you do this right, you can reuse the cap. Now, I bought new ones because my cap on the other side is mangled because whoever did that side didn’t take it off like this. So if I clean this up just a little bit, it’ll be much easier for you to see the bits and pieces inside of here, just a little.

So we’ve got this cotter pin here, which holds on the castle nut here, and then behind that, you’ve got the actual spindle nut itself. So first order of business is to take off the cotter pin. Success! Castle nut, and there’s your actual spindle nut. Now, these actually aren’t typically very tight. As a matter of fact, this one here was just finger tight, just barely. And so there’s a torque spec for these, but it’s really low. It’s like ten foot pounds or something like that. So most of the time, when you’re reading manuals or something, that’ll tell you to snug it up, give it like a quarter turn, rotate everything to make sure everything’s seated, and then turn it back so that you’re not too tight. But we’ll go through that when I do the installation for the new hub.

Now this is all cleaned up and taken apart. This should just come right off. Let’s get our old bearing and washer out of there, and off it comes. So this is the hub and rotor that came out. On the back, you’ve got the rear bearing seal, and since I’m not going to save this seal, I’ve got a new one. I just want to pop this off, and as a matter of fact, to be honest, I’m not going to save this hub and rotor assembly either, so I don’t really care what I do to it. I can get away with this because I don’t care about these bearings. And there we go, our bearing and seal.

So in terms of old parts, we’ve got the old rotor and hub assembly, the old seal, the old inner bearing, and the old outer bearing. But these are all being replaced, so in the garbage they go. Obviously, this is my new hub and rotor assembly. I’ve got it turned upside down so the part that faces the truck is up, and these are my new bearings. Actually, I’ve got, of course, you have two. You have an inner bearing and an outer bearing, and then a new bearing seal. Let me show you this real quick because these rotors are a little bit different than I expected because they come with races already installed. So here’s my Timken bearing, and you can see there’s the actual bearing itself, and then there’s the race that comes with the bearing. But if you look, there’s already a race preset into this hub assembly. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to put this bearing down in here and just verify that it seats in there correctly and I don’t have any issues with it. And it seems to seat and fit very well. So because of that, I’m just going to go ahead and use the race that’s already inside of the hub.

Now, I’ve done a lot of research since I found out that these hubs came with their own races, and I couldn’t find anything definitive that said whether or not I should try to remove these races or if I should just go ahead and use them as they are. Because the argument would be that, well, the Timken race is going to be better quality than that race or that the Timken race and bearing are a matched set and that the bearing won’t work as well on this race as it would work on the Timken race. So here’s my line of thinking: getting these races out of these hubs can be a bit of a chore. You have to have either special tools or know how to weld. If you weld a bead around the outside of the race, when it cools, the race can contract and will sometimes pop off. Trying to beat these out with a screwdriver or a punch or something can be a real pain. You risk damaging the hub itself, maybe mushrooming out the ends and causing some issues. I mean, these things need to be pretty clean and straight or else you’ll get some problems with your wheels, obviously. So I don’t know that I want to chance doing that. I’ve never done that before.

As much as I would love to use the Timken races, I think it’s just going to be too much trouble and potential disaster for me to try to get these races out of these hubs. They’re in there pretty tight. Just to do a test, I took a—let me get it—just to do a test, I took a brass punch and tried to see if I could punch out the outer race of this rotor right here. And you can see that the end of this, if I can get it to focus here, I don’t know if I can. There it goes. Yeah, so you can see that the end of this is pretty well hosed. I mean, it’s brass, so it’s meant to be that way, but that’s what I got trying to pound that race out of this rotor hub assembly. So since I didn’t have any luck trying to get it out, I figure it’s going to be way too much trouble trying to get all four races out of both hub and rotor assemblies, and I’ll just go ahead and use the Timken bearings with the races that came with the rotors.

And here’s the other thing too: if these races came with these rotors and these aren’t necessarily the best rotors out there, they’re Raybestos, which is sort of middle of the line. But if they come like this and they’re installed like this on, you know, thousands and thousands of vehicles all over the country, then you gotta think that these races are probably serviceable. And I’m not gonna be racing my truck or doing anything crazy. If I were, then these would probably be drilled and slotted. As a matter of fact, I’d probably convert this whole thing to be two pieces—the hub and rotor assembly would be separate because you can do that. And then that way, you can go out and get a little bit nicer rotors, drilled, slotted performance rotors. And then I’d probably be upgrading the calipers to double pistons and all this crazy stuff if I were going to be racing the truck, but I’m not.

So if I were worried about all that stuff, then I’d probably go ahead and maybe pound these out. But that’s kind of a moot point because if I were doing all of that, I would make sure to get hubs without races already installed. These hubs are brand new and should be pretty clean, but just to be 100%, I’m gonna hit them with some brake cleaner and a clean rag. The important part is inside these bearing races where the bearings are going to go, just to make sure that there’s nothing in there. This should be a fun experience for me. I’ve never packed bearings before in my life, but that’s the next step. If I want to put this rotor and hub assembly onto my spindle, then I’ve got to pack these bearings with grease.

Now, I’m going to use a bearing packer because, like I said, I’ve never done this before, and I want to make sure that I get the job done right. You can pack bearings using your hands, probably with gloves, by rolling the bearings across your palm and getting all the grease inside of there. But like I said, I’ve never done that before. I am absolutely not an expert, so if I can get a tool that will help me ensure that I’m doing it correctly, that’s what I’m gonna do. So this is actually pretty easy to use. Obviously, it’s never been used before, but take a little plunger out, screw the cone off. You put your bearing in there with, obviously, the taper going in like that. Once you got the bearing in there, screw this back on tight, put all your grease down on the bottom of there, put that in, and push down. And as you compress this, the grease goes up in through those holes right there, out through the holes in there, and goes into all the little nooks and crannies of the bearing, at least in theory. We’ll see how well it really works.

I’m using red and tacky grease for this. All the reviews for this grease are very favorable. It’s got all the right ratings, GCLB and LGI number two. It’s got a really high drop point. Project Farm actually did a video using red and tacky grease. That’s really interesting. So if you haven’t seen Project Farm’s videos, you should go check them out. He’s a really cool dude. So we’re just about ready to get rolling on this. Obviously, the first bearing that I’m going to do my packing on is the inner bearing. That’s the bigger one. And then once the inner bearing is packed and good and gooey, then I can take my bearing seal and pop it on here and then pack my outer bearing, flip this thing around, stick it on the spindle, and get everything put back together.

So there we go. Now that looks to be pretty well packed. All right, now it’s off to the races. Okay, now just a little more right here on top just to make sure it’s good and gooey. I’m not going to have any issues here, and now we can put our seal on. And I’m just gonna make sure that it’s good and even here, and I’m just gonna bang it on with a rubber mallet because I’ve never done this before. I want to make sure to use something like a rubber mallet instead of an actual hammer. It gives me a little more leeway in terms of making mistakes.

All right, so the rear bearing is installed, or the inner bearing I suppose I should say. And now we’ll pack the outer bearing just like that. So I’m just going to take a little bit of grease and put it on the spindle just to make sure that there’s plenty of lubrication here. Now take the hub and rotor assembly that’s already got the rear seal and rear bearing, or inner bearing on it, get it on, and we’ll take my packed outer bearing and get it on. Then we’ll take the spindle washer. Now this is actually the spindle washer that came off the truck. It’s been used, but these don’t really go bad, so you can reuse them. The one that I got with my Dorman kit actually is the wrong one, so I’m gonna reuse the one that goes on the truck.

All right, and now our brand new spindle nut. And you get this on there about as tight as you can by hand, and then you rotate your bearing to make sure it’s seated. And so you can turn this a little more. You want to make sure you don’t get these too tight because if you get them too tight, they’ll put a lot of pressure on your bearings, and they’ll wear out. So as you rotate it around, you notice I can tighten it up even more, right? So I’m going to keep doing this until I can’t hand tighten this anymore, which is right about there. And then I’m going to back off just a little.

The last two parts that I need are my new castle nut and my new cotter pin. So the castle nut just goes over top of this like that, and what you want to do is try to find where this is the right tightness. This nut is the correct tightness so that it doesn’t bind your bearings, but it’s not so loose that it really kind of comes off easy. Yeah, right about there. And find where it lines up good with one of the slots in the castle nut, and then you just drop in your cotter pin and bend it up. There we go.

Okay, now that I’ve got this all assembled, I’m going to load it up a little bit more grease, and I’ll put my cap on. That just goes right on there. It just goes right on there. It just goes right on there. It just goes right on there. It just goes right on there. It might take a little bit of persuading with a rubber mallet. There’s always a bigger hammer.

Okay, so I may have gotten just a little overzealous on the dust cap here. So just to make sure that I wasn’t gonna hurt anything, I went ahead and took it off, which I’ll do now real quick just to check to see if this indentation is going to be too deep. And it turns out that it is. Now, of course, besides the beautiful little China label there, you can see where my cotter pin has been digging into the top of the cap, which means that my dent here is just a little too deep. So this cap is garbage, but that’s okay because I have found a pretty neat trick to get my next cap on here without damaging it.

Now, of course, I bought two, one for each side. I’m gonna use my second cap for this side tonight, and then I’ll pick up another cap at the parts store tomorrow so I can do the other side. So let me show you what I’ve come up with. Here’s my other cap, also made in China, of course. And this is a two-inch piece of PVC, and it just so happens that that cap fits right in there, right along the ridge here. So I’m going to use this piece of PVC to pound this cap in. You get it started first, try to get it centered as much as possible anyway. Feels all right. I will use my PVC and see if I can get it on. Beautiful! Simple trick. It’s the best kind.

Now that the hub and rotor are back on, I’m going to give it one final cleaning before I put the caliper and pads on just to make sure there’s nothing on the braking surface that’s going to trip me up later. Here’s something interesting: these are my brand new brake pads, and they came with this hardware right here, which mounts the caliper to the knuckle. It’s that spring that I removed earlier, and this came with the caliper, so actually I have two sets of this little compression spring, and I don’t need both sets. So because I like the color black, we’re going to use the ones that came with the pads.

The brake shoe kit that I got came with this little clip. Oops! This little clip here, and of course, this is the inner shoe here. So the inner shoe slides into these notches just like that, and the clip is what holds it in. So we turn the clip like this, pop it onto the shoe, and then wedge it in there just like that, and then the caliper goes over top of this. Now that the inner pad is already mounted up, it’s time to put on our caliper. Before we put the caliper in though, we want to make sure we put some brake caliper grease on all the metal parts that are going to be touching each other. So where this pad touches the piston on the caliper, and then where this pad here actually touches the caliper on the other side, you want to make sure that you put some brake caliper grease on that to keep things moving smoothly, keep things quiet.

You also just want to make sure when you’re doing this that you don’t get any brake caliper grease on the actual pads or on the rotor surface itself because that will hurt your braking performance. So I’m going to be greasing the caliper rather than the pads because it’s just easier that way. So we’re just going to put a little bit of grease right around the piston. You don’t need a whole lot, just enough to get it coated. And then this obviously goes this way, but then this mounts on there just like that. So all the places where this contacts, especially in these little grooves and things, I want to make sure I get some grease. All right, there we go. Now I can put my pad on, being careful not to get any grease on the surface of the pad. There we go. And now I should be able to mount my caliper, start from the top here.

So there we go. Sometimes it takes a little bit of persuasion. So now I should be able to put in my holding pin and spring down here in the bottom. You just get it until it lines up with this hole for the bolt, and now we’re ready to put in the bolt. This bolt came with the caliper. It’s already got some thread locker on it. If yours doesn’t, it’s probably a good idea. Here we go, one mounted caliper with brand new brake pads. And now to put on the brake line. Now when you get a new caliper, it should come with a couple of crush washers like these. You want to make sure that you put a crush washer on either side of this block. So I want to put one on this banjo bolt, put one on this banjo bolt here, put it through, and then another. And now we can mount it.

And there we go, one front brake assembly completely replaced. I said before that I feel like there’s a right way and a wrong way to take these caps off. I mean, obviously, there’s a right way or wrong way to put them back on, right? But anyway, so this cap has been taken off what I believe to do the wrong way. If you look, let me get a little bit closer. So there you can see the damage that’s been done to this cap, right? Which allows dust and even maybe liquids and stuff to get inside this little gap there. So you don’t want that. And here is how that happens. Since I’m going to replace this cap anyway, I don’t mind doing it this way to show you what I’m talking about. Taking it off with a pair of channel locks, it works. It absolutely does, but it causes all kinds of damage, and it’s just as easy to use a screwdriver and do it right.

Unlike the other side of the truck, the spindle nut on this side is a little tighter than finger tight, so I’m going to use this 27 millimeter socket to get it off. And that was all it took, just a little bit. These don’t go on very tight. Get the washer and the outer bearing out. Now I’m going to reuse this washer. There’s an interesting thing going on. The replacement kit that I got for this nut, washer, and cotter pin actually has a washer that is different than this one. As a matter of fact, not even the same diameter. Now it looks like it might be able to fit, but when you try to put it on, focus, it’s a little bit tight. Actually, on this side, it’s not too bad. On the other side, it was pretty tight. So since these original washers don’t really get a whole lot of wear on them and they don’t really wear out, I’m just reusing the originals.

So, so, so foreign. Well, that didn’t go as planned. So that means we’re having a part four where I talk about lessons learned and reinstall this brake cable again because this one busted. Talk about this lovely bolt that I sheared off because of this piece of Harbor Freight torque wrench and how I had to replace the master cylinder and the nightmare that I had trying to bleed these brakes. So stay tuned for that. As always, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, guys, and we will see you next time.