Saturday, March 24

A Beum Beum for Gator



This post is a long time coming. After seeing this redux of a Cozy Coupe, I could not wait to get my hands on one to refine for Gator. I searched Craigslist for a good month, only finding ones for $30 or more. I am cheap. Very cheap.

Luckily, I happened to check the free ads and found a Cozy Coupe pickup!

Although it didn't look nearly as nice.


 
It was missing it's gas cap, the front wheels were pigeon-toed and the steering wheel and side mirrors were chewed into oblivion by some large animal. Probably a rabbit.



I found replacement parts on Little Tikes' website for a few dollars (although shipping essentially tripled the price) and waited patiently until they arrived to start. Gator's Papa has an old Ford that he reconditioned himself. We took that as the inspiration and ran with it.






Matt and I started by removing the steering wheel and what was left of the gas cap.




We took a medium-fine grit sandpaper and roughed up the chew marks, then polished them with a fine grit to even it out.

Next came the spray painting. Papa's truck is a beautiful metallic blue with silver detailing. Three cans of spray paint for plastic later, this is what it began to look like:




























Sadly, I didn't take pictures of taping off the bumper, or the detailing we did to the headlights, but this is the final product:

You can hardly see the chew marks!



The finishing touch was the add the license plate from eBay.