The Blacktop Baller Gets Armored

Dupli-Color’s Bed Armor

This is a story of much needed father/son bonding time…

My neighbor rolled his bed liner on a while back. It was super blotchy and didn’t last long at all. We saw the Dupli-Color Bed Armor with truck bed Sprayer kit and thought at about $150.00 it’s a great value. Add a roll of painters tape and a roll of paper for about $15.00 more and you can’t go wrong. We knew that the quality of the surface prep will make or break a good coating.

This went much better than we expected…

I scrubbed the bed with a broom and degreaser agent. Billy got busy and scuffed the entire surface with the scouring pad in the kit. We then cleaned and degreased it again. We spent the afternoon prepping the surface. The next morning of this Memorial Day weekend, we taped up the sides and tailgate. It was a great day to do this. The weather was great and good father/son work in the driveway and garage. I always like working with Billy and lately he has had some challenges with pressure wounds where his braces wrap around his shins. After he healed up, we saw this as a perfect weekend to spray the bed of his truck.

We needed that time together.

Then my nephew Marcus came over after playing a double header in baseball. He got there just in time for the spraying. He helped by moving the truck for us and it’s always great having an extra set of eyes on it to make sure we had an even coat. The sprayer is simple and after several minutes of running air through it and wondering what is going on we found there was a big lump of the stuff in the sprayer. The pressure was set at 30psi, but that was without running it, so we bumped it up a bit and it worked great. And, it’s easy to clean!

We did one light coat, waited an hour then sprayed a good heavy 2nd coat. There is still about a quart left in the gallon pail. We cleaned it all up with some water and sealed it up for possible future uses. Most likely I am going to paint the Mini-Chop II’s frame with it.

The back left corner of the bed gets a lot of abuse when Billy swings his wheel chair in and out and bungee’s it down. I look forward to see how the coating holds up. Take a look at the photos. It was worth the pair of afternoons.

Photos/Story: Tony Colombini