I know I said I wasn't planning on painting the side of the truck 'til I was sure about bracketry and whatnot, but I had an oopsie and my brush slipped.
First coat always looks pretty grim; seems like the opacity isn't really there when brushing this stuff. I had enough in the tin to give a second coat to that centre panel, and that looks significantly better; but I suspect I'll probably be three or four coats in before I'm happy with it. And it seems to take about half a litre of paint per coat, give or take.
And if I force my phone camera's white-balance to play nice, it's pretty good.
And when I got back from doing that, my bolts had come in for putting the locker back on the side; so I'll have to get that in a couple of coats of black and fitted up! Hooray!
Tach reference
The tach I'm using is a VeeThree 37092, 0-4000rpm. It's basically disappeared off the Internet, other than the odd ebay listing; however, it's basically just a clone of a VDO gauge and the settings switches work in the exact same way.
With the power & signal pins at the bottom, the three switches are set as follows:
| Cyls | A | B | C |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | down | up | up |
| 6 | down | up | down |
| 8 | down | down | up |
With it set to 6 cylinders, I can feed it a 50Hz square wave and it will hold at displaying 1000rpm. Lovely. And, fitted back to the truck, with the megasquirt set to tach output on IAC1 (rather than whatever wrong pin I had it set at before), we have...
... a working tach. Stunning, I know!
And then I decided I'd drive the truck outside so I could tackle the growing pile of detritus building up beneath it.
Several hours of sweeping and scooping later (Excuse the shaky photo, I'd not eaten anything during aforementioned several hours, but I had drunk two mugs of coffee):
(Note no back wheels: Door opens to 10'3". Top of the crane is 10'10" with the wheels on.)
It'll be a couple of weeks before I can get more of that yellow paint; got to wait for next paycheck, at which point we'll then run into the bank holiday weekend. On the bright side, that'll give plenty of time for the current coat to dry, because it's still tacky!
Didn't quite manage to reverse the truck back in squarely, so I've somewhat cramped myself up in there, but the upside is that once my torch arrives for the MIG, I'll have a little more room to weld on the remaining brackets for the two loose side-markers on the offside. I also didn't manage to remember to bring the bolts for the side-locker I removed, but I need to get that cleaned up and painted first anyway, so it's no big deal.