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part 15 Remove all masking tape. Remove Pringles lids from the reflectors. You’re done. Now go drive it in a parade.

part 14 Wait several minutes then remove the stencils. Most MV collectors live elsewhere than Texas. Texas has some really MV friendly registration laws. My favorite is the registration number law. You can use any number you choose (as long as it’s not already in use) and stencil the MV in a...

part 13 Now spray. Better to do 3 or 4 light coats than one heavy one. You can use a spray gun or cans of spray paint. Again, Mark at Rapco sells the spray cans. I’ve seen him fill them, he uses the same paint that goes in the gallon cans. You can go cheap and buy any flat black grill paint...

part 12 Now it’s time to identify the vehicle. I know that there are some wonderful guys in the MV field who sell great stencils. I also know what we used in the military. We had two methods. The first method used brass stencils that slid together and had the correct spacing. You can find these...

part 11 Now do exactly the same thing using brown paint, but this time you only need to paint along the black/brown lines. This process sounds a bit complex, but the truth is, I painted the all of the lines on the M820 in under an hour. The photo’s tell the story.

part 10 Wow! The sharp lines between the green and the black are gone! Harbor Freight sells a very cheap ($5) air brush kit with 5 plastic bottles. Use exactly the same mix of paint and thinner and adjust the air brush to shoot a ¾” circle. Using green paint, follow the sharp lines overlapping...

part 9 Now this is what I meant by sharp lines look bad. If you have a $200 paint gun or even if you have basic painting skills, you can avoid this by not using masking tape at all. Just adjust your gun, turn your Orange County Choppers baseball hat around, and do it like they do on TV. If you...

part 8 Remove the masking tape. If you have to break up this sequence by a couple of weeks for any reason, don’t leave the masking tape on. That goes double if you live in a really hot sunny place. Ask me how I know this. No, don’t.

part 7 Okely-dokely, add the 383 brown paint.

part 6 Now I mask it for the brown areas. By the way, all of my paint is Gillespie from Rapco

part 5 These two photo’s show the black paint with the masking tape removed. Oops! Notice how sharp the lines are where the black and green touch. The military does not use sharp lines ever. We’ll fix this problem a bit later.

part 4 Before beginning to mask, let me explain the color scheme. My best memories in the military were when ‘Uncle Ronnie’ was at the helm. We got pay raises, we got training, we got equipment, we kicked ass. The world knew that if you upset Ronald Reagan, he probably wasn’t just going to send...

part 3 A couple of years ago, I was visiting Mark at RAPCO. He was kind of surprised at the amount of green that I bought. I told him that when we painted trucks in the military, we primer the entire truck, then we painted the entire truck green as a base coat. He said that most of his...

part 2 The first thing I did was power wash the truck using a very high power jet very close up. I used a razor blade to cut off major runs and sags from the previous paint jobs. Very little sanding and the small areas of rust were down to bare metal. Phosphoric acid on them. This photo shows...

part1 So today Sarge is going to talk about paint jobs. I’ll talk about the real deal, as done in the military and also the much better paint jobs as done by MV collectors. After blathering on for a bit, I will treat you to many photo’s showing how Sarge does a paint job. Both how and why. I’ll...

Preface: This is Sarge’s first really long post on Steel Soldier’s. Those of you who read my account of Hurricane Katrina know that I tend to talk a lot. If you are not interested, well just enjoy the photo’s. Tis a short story about painting my M820.