Ol Blu Project - Part V

While I had the box off for the last time (hopefully!), I decided to upgrade the air management system for the air bags and while I'm at it... why not find a way to pack in the train horns Brent left behind! I even installed a remote cable to operate the horns like an old 18-wheeler rig. The new system has a Bluetooth connection to my phone and a touchscreen controller which meant I had to get rid of the very cool Dakota Digital monitor. That was kind of a bummer. The bezel/cradle for the new controller was 3D printed and painted to match.

OK, back to paintwork. 

Alrighty, here comes the next curveball. Remember when I decided to paint the truck red because Brent left a lot of Soul Red tri-coat behind?

The problem was that Ol Blu will always be called Ol Blu and when I closed my eyes, it was blue, not red. I spent a few years trying to convince myself that red would be ok, but it wasn't.

The engine compartment would stay red in tribute to the red 10 liter Big Block that Brent made, but the body needed to be blue.

While considering various blues, Danni found a website selling "Blue Me Away" that actually showed an old C10. Over the months, I kinda forgot about that and then my sister Sheri saw a Cadillac ATS-V in blue. I went to the paint store to buy samples of various blues I had liked and when I asked for "Cadillac Kinetic Blue" I got "Blue Me Away". 

They were the same color!

The laws of kismet states I must paint the truck this color!

The plan was to paint all of the parts separately so we could paint the jambs, edges, etc. at once.

It turns out this color is very finicky. It's kinda transparent like a candy color. Keep in mind we are not anything close to professional painters (the last car I painted was 30 years ago), so our spray techniques and gun control wasn't very consistent and this resulted in panel-to-panel mismatch.

Yes, I am aware the body and the dash don't match. I knew this going in, but I didn't want to repaint the dash because this was the last thing I painted with Brent, but I didn't like the dash color enough to paint the entire truck that color (my tastes changed in the last 8+ years).

After several days of consideration, I made the difficult decision to sand down most of the panels that had been painted (hood, fenders, doors, cowls, grill surround) and repaint them as an assembled truck (mostly). Luckily the outside of the box and tailgate had not been painted.

This meant a lot of sanding, but it also provided me another opportunity to block sand and make improvements.

It also meant a lot, a lot, A LOT of masking.

I UV-printed Foghorn Leghorn on the back window.

The bed was aligned using lasers.

After much color sanding, panel alignment, tweaking adjusting and assembly, I took Ol Blu home only a few hours before the 2026 Cruise Night in Longmont.

It took another couple of weeks to get a windshield installed and as of now (August 2026), I still need to figure our what to do for the bed floor.

Finally, I little retrospective (in order)...