Sprinter van: The body shop

For the past week, our van has been in the body shop. Which is essentially our driveway. Now it looks like this:

For comparison, it used to look like this:

I like. K just smiles and nods.

Besides some elbow grease, I think we spent about $50 on various cans of spray paint and exactly $6 at the Dollar Tree when K had the brilliant idea of picking up six rolls of kraft paper. That stuff is awesome. So awesome, in fact, I took a photo of it.

Oh yeah. I used –– and reused –– a lot of it. On the rear bumper.

On the front bumper.

The rear wheel trim I was able to remove and paint without having to mask. That was nice.

Yep, for all of the plastic trim (including the rear and front bumpers, the rear side bumpers, and rear wheel trim) I used Dupli-Color Trim and Bumper Paint in good ol' fashioned black. Yep, for $8 a can all of our trim went from gray to black. It took 3 cans. For what it's worth, the adhesion seems spectacular. We'll see of course how it holds up over time. For now I'm impressed.

So much so, in fact, once I finished I thought to myself: I bet it'd look pretty cool if I painted the shiny license plate holder black. Wait, what about the shiny grill? And the Dodge emblem on the hood?

In order to have the best chance of success with the paint adhering to the plastic, I washed all of it and wiped it down with rubbing alcohol immediately before spraying. The grill turned out really nice. I did mask off the black slats, though in hindsight I'm not sure why.

More masking for the shiny hood cover which, coincidentally, the Dodge-branded Sprinter has in place to cover the cutout in the hood for the big Mercedes logo. There's a YouTube video that shows how to take off the plastic chrome trim when rebranding a T1N back to Mercedes. It's a thing, tearing off all the Dodge emblems and spending a few hundred dollars on replacement Mercedes emblems. I'm not against it.

For now, the black will satiate my desire to rebrand. It looks pretty legit.

So does all the once gray now black trim.

Next up: wheels. It turns out, finding replacement wheels for the stock steel ones is really hard. Not that we want to be spending money on wheels. We really don't. We'd rather buy swivel seats. I mean, we did. They'll be a game-changer. They're supposed to show up Thursday. So instead of new wheels, once again enter: Dupli-Color paint. This time, their matte black wheel paint. That's right: $7 a can. Again, it took three cans.

For the first wheel, I assumed it'd be easier to take off the wheel. So I jacked up the van.

I ordered taller jack stands from Home Depot that have a double locking mechanism. Though our previous Harbor Freight jack stands weren't recalled, a friend of K's made the suggestion that perhaps equipment that could kill you shouldn't be sourced from Harbor Freight. A sound point. Sans stands, the van was a little precarious, and I a little paranoid. Particularly with Squish insisting on biking around it. K eventually drew a line with sidewalk chalk and we reminded him periodically to stay outside the line.

Jacked up, I took off the front passenger-side wheel and inspected the brakes while I was at it. They have some pad left and the rotors aren't bad. I'll still replace them once I get the stands. For painting, I heaved the wheel on my makeshift painting bench and got to work.

I had watched a Chris Fix video about painting wheels and he had the clever suggestion of using index cards to block any overspray. Brilliant. Did we have any index cards? I asked K. She thought we did, but I couldn't find them. What I remembered having was a box of Pantone-branded cards a friend of mine gave me while he was my boss and I was a color geek. Once a color geek always a color geek, but that's a story for another time. For now, they worked perfectly.

Three coats on the wheel and the plastic hub and the first wheel was done.

Sweet. Besides 6x16" black wheels that support an 8500-pound rig being hard to find, so are black lug nuts. So I ordered some black vinyl lugnut caps for (drumroll… ) $7 on Ebay. Should look great. They're black.

Onto the second. Except… it wouldn't come off the hub. Uhh, probably not a big deal, but with the van only up on the hydraulic jack, I didn't want to bang on the wheel. So I tried painting it in place. Turns out, it worked just as good and meant I didn't have to remove it. Win-win.

I did appreciate having the wheel off the ground so I could spin it a half-turn for each coat. So I jacked up the two corners in the rear as I got to those wheels. With a quick search, I couldn't find a definitively good location to jack up the rear of the van (not the differential housing!), so I opted for the safe route and used the factory placements on the shock mounts. Yep, it meant only jacking up one corner at a time. Better that than screwing something up. The catch was my 3-ton jack – even with a nearly-24" lift height – couldn't get the rear wheels off the ground. I shimmed a scrap 2x6 which gave me an extra inch-and-a-half. Just enough to let me spin the wheels.

I left one lugnut on to keep the wheel from falling off. That also allowed me to spin it easily. Maybe an hour per wheel and they were all finished. Time to dry for a while before inflicting any rocks on them. Again, we'll see how the paint holds up over time, but I'm also impressed with this paint. I think there must be something about specific types of spray paint for different applications.

Oh, with the $7 plastic lug nut caps…

Last on the body shop docket for now: rust touch up. Like I said in our post about having bought our van, this one didn't have any worrisome rust. This really is just some touch up. The thing does have nearly 250,000 miles on it, after all. For the small spots, a scour pad and rubbing alcohol did the trick before using either a 1" foam brush or Q-Tip (which Sefton refers to as 'bones,' clever little boy) to apply the Rust-Oleum protective enamel. For the larger chunks, really only along the top rear gutter, I broke out my Craftsman multi-tool.

It made short work of the rust. My grinder would have made even shorter work of it, but I was afraid it'd make, well, too short of work of it. The little oscillating tool I picked up on a whim at the Sears tool outlet a few years ago was perfect.

It was then a simple matter of painting. Done. The last thing I still have to do is touch up the hood. In full transparency, the first photo is doctored. I cloned all the rock chips off the hood to get a sense of if it'd be worth it to mask and paint it. The verdict: yes, yes it would. And yes, we're planning on having the van fully painted next year. Again, this little bit of work will get us by in the meantime.

Speaking of in the meantime, a little spoiler: while I've busied myself shaking and spraying cans of paint, K has set up a sewing room in our garage.

We'll see what she's been up to once she's finished. For the two of us, next up: a roof rack and awning.