After years of hauling heavy, metal things in the bed of my truck the inside is starting to look rather beat up. I've been lucky that it's not really rusty, so I've just sprayed primer every summer here and there as time allows and not really thought about it.

However, this coming weekend I'm going to help my uncle haul a tremendous amount of machinery from PA to Brooklyn, and the bedbox will be in the way so I removed it to make more room as I had time yesterday to do this. Wadded underneath the bedbox was about 6" of soggy, oily pine needles so I swept those out as well, revealing caked sand. So I chopped at that and swept that out as well, to find oily mud caked on the bedfloor. This didn't want to sweep out, so I powerwashed it!

Unfortunately, along with the caked on oily mud, some of the primer I added years ago flaked off along with surrounding paint, and I discovered in the the right corner near the cab, the bedfloor was looking fairly horrid. After numerous pokes with a screwdriver, I decided the rust was just nasty flaky surface rust and I didn't have to carve out a section and weld in a patch panel. So I brushed the snot out of it with a stiff stainless brush to remove as much as I could.

Painted the rusty bits that were now exposed with "Ospho", which converts iron oxide to iron phoshate, a tough substance that stops the rust and acts as a primer. In my experience this product works very well actually.

So, I started off with this essentially:



Since I'm unemployed, buying a plastic liner is not an option, and I really hate those things anyway. A roll/brush/spray on liner is a great choice, but I couldn't find a local supplier that had the materials in stock, everyone had to order it and that's a few days to a week. Being impatient, I decided to buy a can of Rustoleum "hammer finish" paint. I've used this paint (in grey) on my workbench tops and in the last year they've taken a tremendous amount of abuse while displaying minimal damage. If the paint can survive my beating a rusty caliper off a rusty spindle for 20 minutes, including several misses where I directly hit the worktop, that's good enough for me. It's hard enough to stay on whatever you paint it on, yet flexible enough to "contour" as whatever you paint dents and distorts through abuse.

So, I painted the inside of my truck bed with this substance, one can per coat, three coats, each can being $13ish at Ace Hardware. I had enough $5 off coupons that Ace mailed me as a club member that the total cost including brushes was about $7.

And the end result was a nice, hammerered finish just like the can says, that seems fairly tough and should survive some of my usual abuses. I may even repaint "Superbumper" with this stuff as the paint is starting to flake off that as well, and maybe the ugly red paint I put along the bottom of the truck bumper to bumper, since the red doesn't match the interior at all, dispite what the color looked like on the can.

Anyway, end result:




Was a little time consuming to spread around as it's like syrup, and the incredibly cheapo brushes I used (4 for $1) really weren't stiff enough for the job however since this paint doesn't really come off even with acetone, I figured cheap brushes are disposable. So, I suffered a bit slathering this around the bed but it I'm satisfied with it.

Here is a closer view so you can sorta see the finish:



Excuse the dent in the wheel tub in the photo, that was from a 528 hemi that toppled off it's wood stand when the wood split

 

Shame! A dented wheel tub?

Your usual creative thinking Frederic, appears to have achieved a very nice result. How long till that paint is completely cured?

Revive the thread and post results after you beat it up for a while.

 

I really like the way it looks.

 

Thanks for the feedback guys!

Had some hammer finish left over, so I decided to complete body work I didn't last summer.

Since the red I applied to the bottom of the bed and the fenders, which I redid last summer, didn't even come close to matching the darker red of the interior, I never bothered to do the bottom of the cab. Within a short time (six months) the red started to flake off anyway, which was annoying as I expected rustoleum to stick to the new automotive paint.




You can see in this picture the "partial" red, and how the fender/bed are a brighter white than the cab, as the cab's paint had many more years to age. Anyway, I have to shoot the whole truck over but I don't have time for that now so I simply covered the rockers with the hammer finish black paint I had left over, like so:




Since I have a tiny bit left, I'm thinking about masking the wheel arches, and painting just the wheel lips with this stuff as well, to visually connect the black on the bottom of the front fender to the black of the bumper, and to connect the black in front and back of the rear wheel on the bed. Just about a 1" curve around the lip. Should have enough for three coats like everything else I've painted, but I'm not quite sure I want to do that yet.

While I was masking the sides so I could apply the black, I had a moment of insanity and masked the indentation at the top of the taillight all the way to the headlights, and considered painting that black as well. Then I decided not to bother since it will be nothing more than annoying next spring when I get around to shooting the entire truck (minus the new black of course).

I still have to remove my crooked pinstripe job from 5-6 years ago.

It's a shame they don't make this hammer-finish paint in white... because if they did I'd paint the entire truck with it, but only after mixing in a UV protectant and a hardener. Anyway, they don't make it in white so I don't have to sidetrack and think about this and how to make it last. For some reason I really like the hammer finish a lot.

The only spot I forgot to do was the bottom of the tailgate. oooops...

 

keep us posted on how durable it is i might like to put it in the bed of my 68 i'm restoring.

 

The rocker panels look great too.

 

Looks awesome. I am interested in how it holds up and I think it will do fine. I may do that to my truck.

 

i think that using a small roller makes it a bit easier than brushes- havent' tried it with the rusto stuff though.

looks real good- hopes it lasts the extererior weather- that will be the test i think.

 

Well Roger, I chose to use a brush because brushes were cheaper than rollers or roller pads. My local Ace Hardware didn't have small foam rollers in stock, and I didn't want to use cotton rollers as to avoid having cotton embedded in the finish. Bad enough there's a few pine needles in it now

If your bed is like mine, using a brush was actually good for all those deep dings from years of loose heavy stuff bouncing around in the bed. Essentially puncture wounds that didn't quite puncture through. A lot of dabbing in those spots, and my bed is littered with them.

Teaches me to tie my loads down better

Which reminds me... the flip-up d-ring mounts arrived in the mail yesterday, so I'll be making backing plates for those one of these evenings and installing those in the corners of the bed for tying down loads - d-ring mount on top, backing plate on bottom, bolted or riveted through if I can dig out enough 3/8" rivets. By putting these mounts in the corners of the bed, that leaves the whole length between the wheel tubs flat and unobstructed so plywood and sheet rock and slide right in without being damaged.

A buddy of mine is still trying to convince me to go "wild" with the rest of the paint... but I have until next year to decide such. Something along the lines of these (please excuse the lousy rendering, neither of us can draw):

.

I envision a purchase of about 200 rolls of masking tape!

 

Frederic, how long between coats did you have to wait? How well is this holding up? I ask because there is a lot of rust starting to form on the cradle in my sisters cavalier and i need to find a way to make it last for a long time still. It is surface rust for now, but with winter in minnesota fast approaching I need a solution now. Will the hammer tone paint hold up to salt and slush? It will never see daylight so I dont have to worry about UV.

 

I figured that...the brush was an economic thing. I've spred a lot of por15 and gator urethane stuff lately- the tight foam vs cloth makes a huge difference- used some cheap brushes and had a lot of bristles come out - stole...er..borrowed some of my wifes good brushes to get corners etc. I have 3 more projects to finish now...'77150, 72 torino cobra and 70.5 falcon which is a torino body.

 

Roger - I'm inherently cheap

Wicky - for the top perimeter and the vertical surfaces, I waited however long it took me to apply one coat, then immediately pivoted, and started on the original side working my way around again for the second coat. Took about 40 minutes to do the tops and vertical surfaces, so that would be my estimate. It gets very tacky very quickly. After I did the second coat, I then did one coat on the floor, and let that dry overnight mostly because I didn't want to take the chance of leaving footprints on it while applying the second coat. So the second coat went on in the morning, and the third coat went on in the evening, and the following morning I did the tops and vertical surfaces for the third time, and finished up with a fourth coat on the ribs that stick up on the floor just because I had extra paint left over and I wanted to make it thick so it lasts a while.

Surfaces you have to walk on to paint, I'd give several hours on a reasonably warm day, otherwise 30 minutes is enough. I put three coats on the tailgate in one day, since painting that was an afterthought.

So far it's survived well, I've dragged a pile of junk to the scrapyard today and it held up okay. There's a scrape on the tailgate but it's not all the way through all three layers... but it might not have been fully cured because the evening I finsihed with the third coat it started to rain But the bed isn't scratched at all.

Is it as tough as a spray/roll on bedliner? Nope. Will it last as long? Nope. Is it good enough for $30? Yep!

 

I have only seen the hammered finish paint in spray cans, where did you get the cans? And where is a good place to get ospho? I am thinking I will use the lift at school one day and scrape the cradle clean, then treat with ospho and put several coats of hammer finish paint on, hopefully that will be strong enough to withstand winter.

 

My local Ace Hardware has hammered finish paint in quarts to brush/roll on, and in spray cans (which seems to be double the price per square footage in coverage), and they also have Ospho. Coincidentally, on the same shelf right next to one another. They have the Ospho and products like that, then the hammered paint, then primers, then the fancy sand interior paints, then onto the industrial paints that rustoeum is known for.

 

So would it be a good idea to use the hammered finish paint on the cradle of a car, or is there a better rust preventing paint? How long does the ospho have to sit before you can paint? Did you rough up the paint that wasn't rusted/scratched already?