Pink Van

Hmmm, I'll have to try taking a picture of the van in the sunset/rise sometime to bring out the pink. You can't really tell it's pink in this picture.

Here's a sample of it.

Pictures from this weekend

It's been pouring all week. Today it stopped, so we built another plastic tent to spray my van in. (The plastic is to contain overspray, it's not good enough to keep the van bone dry in a downpour.)


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The ever helpful Puka helps to tape the van



Taping off areas I don't want paint.





Random signage. For those who just can't make up their minds...

What I did this weekend

I drove the van over to a friend's house, where we finished prepping it and built a plastic tent.



I buffed and wiped the sanding dust off my van with their dog...




Fancy spray gun!



We were out spraying until 9pm last night. The van is now a nice, shiny pink. We'll give it another coat sometime this week, in between rain showers. More pictures to come soon! And then...interior work.

There's a fabric store going out of business around the corner from me, so I bought 7 yards of really pretty fabric to redo my tattered seat and bed covers. Should be fun!

Transportation

For the past two weeks, I've been driving my van instead of bicycling to work. I have to be at work at 5:30am most mornings...so it's been a nice change of pace to roll out of bed and be at work only a few minutes later. One evening I even slept in the parking lot, really cutting down on my commuting time.

Now that I have this van, gas prices actually mean something to me after 1 1/2 years. Holy cow! I'm not sure what sort of gas milage I get, as my odometer is broken. I think I've been getting about 18/gal.

I'm slowly sanding and priming away....I even picked out the final color yesterday. I'm planning on painting it on Saturday. Anybody know of a good empty lot or a field with lots of trees around it, with suitable room for spraying with a hvlp system? I can't spray in my neighborhood because the overspray travels and will stick to anything within 100 feet or so.

Pictures of Heather's van

Working on the van

I started out sanding just the rusty spots, intending to smooth outward from said spots and blend into the rest of the existing paint....

But I decided it was taking too long, and bought some industrial strength airplane paint stripper. Hasta la vista, existing paint job!

I quickly primed all of the bare metal to protect it from supposed upcoming rain that hasn't happened yet.

I need to figure out what color to paint this van. I'm leaning towards a light pink or green. Maybe a combo of the two? Hmmm....

Grafitti

Random bathroom grafitti.

Random animals

Horse with a hat in Marble Falls

Kittens in a park in Blanco.

New pictures

I bought a new van! It's a 1985 VW Vanagon with the super duper pop up top. I just got it registered and insured two days ago, so last night I decided to take it on a camping trip.

I drove out west to Pedernales Falls SP and camped in the parking lot of their primitive sites. I had the entire place to myself.... just me, the trees, and the thunderous lightning storm that dumped 3 and 3/4 inches that night. I kept the top down and slept on the foldout bed instead. It was cool to lay on my back and look up through the skylight at the flashing lightning above.

Earlier that day, I had gone hiking around the park. It went from not raining and this light out...














... to this, in less than a minute.