Good morning folks.

Forecast is 75 degrees and sunny today for north GA. Found the brake lines on Amazon, thanks Andy and Wesley.

 

Hey now, if your wife gets upset about it blame Andy

 

Almost. I posted a small picture below from the website where I bought mine, but will post a real picture of the entire kit after I get home tonight and unpackage them.





I bought my kit from EGRBrakes.com. The picture on their site only show a 3-hose kit, and our trucks require 5 hoses in total, and they are all available from EGRBrakes.




You really want those pictures? I can post some, but it will be another week to ten days before I can include any "after" pictures. I'll just tease you all for now with the spray booth setup I built in the garage for all the spraying, but I have a meeting in 2 minutes and have to go right now... pictures to come!

 

That is a nice kit! Thanks for more reason to spend money I don't have. That's alright, the kids can eat next week.

 

Wouldn't be the first time a woman was mad at me.

 

I try to budget things out so the kids can eat at least every other day.

 

LOL...Hmmmm, you might be on to something.

 

OK, Sous... here are a few starter pictures of my Kitchen Re-facing Project (and my typically long-winded version of a "brief explanation").

The first Overview picture just gives you an idea of what we are starting from.

The temporary spray booth is a 8'x8' canopy from HD, wrapped in 4 mil PE on three sides. The fourth side is two frames made from 1x2's covered with an old king size sheet with duct-tape hinges. Canvas tarp on the floor covered by a plastic lined paper sheeting material. Two temporary clamp-on 100 watt shop lights provide the interior lighting.

Drying racks are 2x4 construction with knock-down support feet so they can be collapsed and hung on the wall. The racks are 2' long pieces of 1/2" EDC conduit with foam pipe insulation pieces so that the sprayed pieces do not contact and metal surface. Obviously, the conduit pieces can be pulled out of the rack and stored in a couple of large buckets. The foam is disposable and very cheap.

Inside the spray booth I have a knock down plastic table which is covered in paper to keep it clean. There is a 11" lazy susan to make a turntable with large scrap wood panels and foam pipe insulation standoffs on which all the doors and drawer fronts get laid for spraying (turntable was a lifesaver, for sure). I used a large hot water heater box as a test/practice panel for setting up and checking the spray pattern between batch cups of coating.

The intake and exhaust filters are just cheap A/C filters (doubled up) on double-wall boxes which protrude through the plastic walls and outside the garage. The exhaust blower is my Rikon dust collector with a 2hp 1250 CFM blower. The motor is isolated from the air path. The discharge hose was routed outside through the canopy's box into another "trap" box outside the garage -- the "trap" was to catch any over spray which did not get captured on the filters (that way, I would not "paint" the driveway or garage door as the high velocity air vented outside), and the trap actually caught passed-through over spray mist very nicely!

My sprayer is a Fuji MiniMite 3 which is a 3-stage turbine running at about 5.5 psig at the gun. I used a bottom feed, pressure assisted 1-quart cup. I sprayed the General Finishes Milk Paint with a 1.8mm needle setup, and used a 1.0mm needle for the General Finishes water-based High Performance Topcoat.

We reworked the existing face frames by the following method:

- deglossing
- grain filling with a drywall compound (I tested four different products, and the drywall compound was the easiest and fastest to use)
- sanded smooth (by hand only)
- brush primed with Zinsser B.I.N. primer for bonding and tannin blocking (Kilz is crap for tanning blocking)
- three coats of the GF milk paint (hand brushing)
- three coats of GF HP Topcoat satin clear (hand brushing)

Each door and drawer front got the same primer, base coat, and clear coat treatment as the face frames. The primer was hand brushed due to tight scheduling around my business travel (not ideal, but doesn't show through too badly), but the milk paint and topcoats were all sprayed.

Oh, and the original doors and fronts are all tossed and replaced with brand new custom made Hard Maple doors and fronts from a company in Arizona (TheDoorStop). Those guys were top notch, and almost ALL measurements came out perfectly to my specifications (everything within 1.5mm tolerance, which is less than 1/16 inch).

LOTS of work, but it is really coming our beautifully.

 

That's some serious work. I just put in a new kitchen, from Kraftmaid. Terrible experience. Somewhat fortunately the Kraftmaid rep was so bad my credit card denied final payment, so I got everything solely for the deposit. Living in eastern PA, not that I'll ever do this again, but around here I'd likely source everything from the Amish in Lancaster.

 

School lunch?? Food stamps???

 

Damn, Pete, that is nice!!!!

 

Yes sir ... you should be proud of your hard work and the excellent results you've produced!

 

Pete, I think you got the "before" and "after" pics confused.

Stewart

 

Thanks, guys. That really is the "before" pic, Stew. It all looks OK in the pictures, but those cabinets and doors are about 35 years old, and the finish is literally gunky in places. You just can't really see it unless you get up close and personal with them, like we did every day!

What drove the whole face lift project was some oven cleaner which drizzled out of the bottom oven across the front of that drawer underneath it, and it left a grayed stripe 1/2" wide from top to bottom after removing all of the stain and varnish (Can you spell "last straw"?). The cabinets' appearance only held up as long as it did because my wife is meticulous and rigid about keeping them regularly cleaned and rubbed with Liquid Gold.

I also have to credit my wife with most of the work since she is hammering at it throughout most days while I'm at work. She has also stripped and completely refinished about 9 other pieces of furniture this year as well as staining and finishing our kitchen table and its 6 Windsor chairs after paying someone else to strip those.

When I was shopping for our doors and drawer fronts, I was very tempted to order from one of the Amish shops, but I found the place in Arizona where they were actually using tighter tolerances with faster delivery and lower prices. Our granite tops and cabinet boxes were in decent enough shape to where all I needed to do was reface them. Otherwise, I would have built the new case parts myself. I wish I could have sprayed the inside of the cabinets, too, but that was just too much to tackle in the middle of everything else.

Hopefully, I'll be able to take the "after" pictures this weekend, because all that's left is mounting the doors and drawer fronts.

 

I'll definatly make sure my wife doesn't see your post. Amazing how a remodeled kitchen can be "perfect" when we closed on the house, and a few hours later i hear about how its completely awful and needs gutted while i was moving in the first boxes... 13 years later it's still capable of producing good food