Autorama 2013

ThunderPig's first car show of the year, Auto Rama SLC! This is by far one of our favorites and most stressful of shows to take the pig to..

Reasons for being our Favorite:
The show is indoors with a lot to see! This year they had 2 bat mobiles to check out!
Lots of bling.. The cars that practically travel in glass boxes show up on turn tables!
plenty of fun competition categories with a good chance at winning $$$ too! :-)
And ease of mind with plenty of security running around

Why it's more stressful?
Cleaning and polishing the truck for the first time each year takes a lot of time and when there is still snow on the ground it's hard to find motivation to clean every nook and cranny.
Getting the truck to the show.. Do you drive or trailer it? Trailering is such a drag ;-) but wet salty roads sometimes makes that decision easy..
Renting stanchions to place around the truck is almost a necessity for a display
Showing up with a full tank and then trying to tell security the gauges don't work and that its really only 1/4 full to meet dire Marshall codes.. (Yes this happened to me this year.. I must have topped off the tank last fall before covering the truck for winter. And yes the gauges do work.. See previous post.. LOL!)
Knowing that the awards show is almost 2 hrs long.. Little room lots of people.. No fun.

Anywhoooo.. Enough on that! Check out the pictures from the show!

Ok, I can't wait for you to scroll down.. We won! That's right! The second year in a row we won Best in Class for Street Machine Pickup! :-) we were really stoked.. Ok now you can check out the pictures below.

New Gauges Installed!

Check out Thunderpig's new Auto Meter gauges! They look and work great!  

Thanks Dad and Marc Schmuhl for your help getting them installed! 

New Gauges!

The gauges in ThunderPig have never worked all that well.. We've had trouble with the fuel and oil pressure gauges since day 1.. and recently we came to realize that the water temp is reading high as well.. I made a call to the company I bought the original gauges from and told them, I don't want to use their junk gauges any more and would like to find out what the size of each gauge was so I could order some new Auto Meter gauges..

The guy didn't even skip a beat and said, "Oh we've had a lot of customers contact us with gauge issues. The company we used to buy from went out of business.. Let me send you some new Auto Meter gauges."

I was pretty excited! Because they're not cheap! Now I just need to install'em!

Keep your fingers crossed for me in hopes that the issues I've been having are gauge related and not something else ;-)

The Latest Finishing Touch for the Bed

Originally the plan was for Joe to weld up a few angle strips in stainless steel to match the stainless bedwood strips on the bed. However welding with stainless is really tough.. Even after bringing in a professional "stainless steel" welder to give this a try, the decision was made to scrap this plan and instead go with steel angle strips 

The steel proved to be less prone to warping, deforming, and pitting as you can see from the stainless strip above (this strip has not yet been ground or polished.. so you can see how much work went into the metalwork just to fill it in enough to produce a smooth surface that could be polished)

Here is a steel angle strip after Joe welded and ground it down.

Next a thin layer of bondo was applied to each radius to smooth everything out before being painted.

New bed strips installed and ready to be tightened down. The angle strips will keep the wood in place better and reduce vibration on the road and from debris from flinging up into the bed (yes its happened.. not fun)

So there you have it!  Honestly, I think the bedstrips look great painted and tie in perfectly. Great job guys!

Fields of Green.. and Red?

This afternoon, Dad, Zach and I took a ride in Thunderpig.. It was an amazing day with hardly a single cloud in the sky. We pulled off the side of the road and snapped a few pictures of the truck with nothing but fields of green and Mt Timpanogos in the background.  We had a great drive and I couldn't have asked for a better time.

Thanksgiving Point UVU Car Show 2012

Today was the UVU car show at Thanksgiving Point. My Dad and I have been looking forward to this show all year because last year we entered ThunderPig before the truck was finished and one of the judges told us that if it would have been finished we would have won an award!!!  Oh that hurt.  So this year we made sure we were ready!! 

My Dad came to Utah to help me out with the show. We arrived at Thanksgiving Point at 6am to snag a primo spot at the show near the main pavilion. Then we finished shining the truck. It looked great!

My son is such a ladies man. I told him to go stand in front of this Camaro for a quick picture while there was no crowd and he said "Can I take a picture with her?" LOL.. The car was at an airbrushing booth, and the girl at the booth overheard his request and of course ran right over and stood next to him. I was laughing pretty hard.

We even saw batman at the show! I told Zach he could go take a picture with him too and he said "No".  He absolutely loves Batman.. So I'm not sure why he wouldn't stand next to him, but we definitely spent a lot of time checking out his ride!  :-)

Zach also entered a coloring contest.. He ended up taking 2nd place, but only because the entry submitted by the winner had a bit of help by a parent.. Either that or somewhere out there is a 4year old Picaso. heh heh..

After walking around the show we went back and Zach helped me polish the truck some more...

Great job Zach! He's a great helper and loves to go to the shows with us.

After a long day, it was nice to relax with Zach and Grandpa while we wait for the judging.

And the votes are in and we won!!!!!!! The Thanksgiving Point UVU show gives out jackets instead of trophies and we won a sponsors jacket!  Wear it proud Dad! :-)

Lets go see a movie!

I've taken my oldest son to the movies a few times in Thunderpig. He gets a huge kick out of it and now every time we say we're going to a movie, he squeals with delight and heads straight over for Thunderpig. I admit, I love it to.

Today I took him to see another movie. We had lots of skittles and even more laughs together. Thanks Thunderpig!