Well, for various reasons, including travel and doing some immediately required work on yet another project truck (yes, I know
), I wasn't able to get back to the M715 bed until a couple of days ago, when we had a warm sunny day (mid 70s).
What had surprised me before was digging through some of the layer of "flaking rust" and finding good green paint underneath, not at all what I expecting!
Most of what was there turned out to be rust coloured crud, and while there were loads of actual rust flakes, they weren't from the M715 itself. I think something that had rusted to death had been carried in the bed at some point, and left all that residue behind.
I cleaned all the crud out the bed, and found the metal to actually be in very good shape. There was quite a bit of surface rust from where that chemical had spilled, and there is some rust pitting in spots, but that is old and had been painted over. I took a wire wheel to the bed and cleaned out the surface rust and flaky layers of paint down to mostly bare metal, sprayed that down with rust converter and let it sit in the sun a bit, then sprayed black rust primer over it.
Once I've done more surface prep and am sure the existing rust is "healed", I'll paint it with bed liner, which will conceal much of the surface irregularities.
Another issue to deal with is that The Mad Driller has been at work on this truck. On a quick count, I came up with 43 non-stock holes drilled around the bed! Someone with no spatial awareness and no concept of how to use any type measuring device had a go at the poor truck. There are holes so close together that they defy explanation, and other holes that just seem scattered around the bed. Perhaps they mounted some
very oddly shaped gear back there.....
I'll figure out how to deal with holes before proceeding with paint. There is still a lot of work to do before then.
While I was wire wheeling the bed, I also did a little surface rust/flaky paint removal on the back of the truck.
The 715 was owned by a volunteer fire department at some point in it's life, and at the risk of being rude, that explains a lot regarding drunken-spider wiring and random hole drilling.
At least they didn't paint the inside of the cab red!
Cheers