With the makeshift paint booth done on Thursday night the only thing left to do was paint.  I used 6 cans of Rustoleum "Aluminum" color.  This paint covers well but seems to run more than the yellow I used last time. It was also harder to tell if I got full coverage, I think the silver speckles messed with my eyes. I sprayed 4 cans on Thursday night, then another 2 on Friday covering some of the spots I missed.  On sat I still noticed a few more light spots and touched those up along with painting the boatsides black. 

Here's the end result.

The next project is wiring.  I figured I wanted to get this done before the axles were installed so I had plenty of room to work.  I borrowed a right angle drill to drill cable cradle mounting holes in the frame, there's no way I would have gotten holes in some of the spot with a normal drill.

After watching a lot of the motorcycle building shows on the Discovery channel I decided to emulate their practice of routing wires inside the tubing.  These two pictures show the interior LED lighting, note how in the first picture you can't even see any wires.  The second picture shows the LED strip in the main cabin, there is a short run of wire visible before I could get it into a tube heading in the direction I needed the wires to go. I have had a lot of people ask me about the blue lighting they have seen in some of my night pictures.  I used blue LED strips in my last buggy, purchased from Target.  Unfortunately it seems Target no longer carries these so I had to source some red ones from Ebay.  If you want 4 strips, the under car kits are a decent buy but you can also buy them in pairs. These ran approximately $15 per strip plus shipping.  The big advantage of these over a standard halogen bulb is super low power consumption.  You could leave these on all night and not run down your battery. 

Taillight wiring.

I needed to install the transmission tunnel so I could add some routing holes for the main wiring harness.

The fuel pump and filter were mounted under the fuel cell and I ran a ground wire for the fuel pump.  Still need to route a power wire back there.

I really liked how clean the wiring for the front headlights turned out.  I ran 5 wires inside the outer tube, one for each headlight, one for the halo light in each headlight and a spare wire.  The drivers side wire separate from the passenger side wires near the shock mount and route inside the cross member to the other side. 

I needed to dress up the pedals a bit so I picked up these pedal covers from the local parts store. The clutch and brake pedals clamped onto the existing pedals without problems but I couldn't get the gas pedal cover securely attached.  I ended up cutting off the injection molded gas pedal and fabricating a new piece from steel.  After transferring the holes from the pedal cover I positioned the pedal where I wanted it and welded it on.  After some paint it was better than new.

One of the things I did that has really kept me going is stocking up on hardware before I started trying to assemble the interior and wiring.  Nothing slows the project more than lots of trips to the hardware store for a couple nuts and bolts.  Last week I ordered some 10-32, 1/4-20 and 5/16 pan head screws, and matching nuts from Mcmaster-Carr.  A box of a hundred screws was $3-6 depending on the size, the grade 5 nuts were even less at roughly $2 a box. I had previously picked up a nylock nut and washer assortment from the local Harbor Freight.  Amazingly both little bins were roughly $3 on sale, for comparison I was paying roughly .10 cents a nut at the local home depot, nylock nuts are even more.

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