28 Nov The Project X Story: Chapter VI, The Devil’s In The Details
Welcome back! While we are busy compiling blog posts for later this week, check out our third-to-last installment of The Project X Story.
With the big stuff out of the way, there’s certainly no slowing of work on Project X. After all, there are still plenty of details to work through. First, we’ll start with the lighting situation. After installing the front bumper, we knew there was too much open space on either side of the radiator shroud. Given the theme of the car up to this point, we realized that the best thing to eliminate that open space would be a set of Hellas. Not only will they fill out the look of the front fascia, but they’ll also be helpful in the event we end up as part of a search party, or scout for a rally course.
From there, the last detail of the front bumper remained – the skid plate. We knew that we could just tack on another piece of steel and say, “Hey, that looks pretty okay.” But pretty okay isn’t in our dictionary. Thankfully, ‘awesome’ is, so we set foot on that track, and came up with a trick little skid plate for Dick Cook, the man to whom the X5 would be going. And it looks pretty darn cool. Sadly, you can only really see it when the car is at rest, and you’re underneath it, but he and we know it’s there, and that’s what counts.
At this time, we prepped the pieces to head out to the powdercoater, and they disappeared for a few days. In the meantime, though, we began prepping the exterior for its new paint job. As always, our Romanian superhero Luci was on the task!
The color we whipped up for Project X was a custom blend that we named “Feldgrau,” after the color used on German artillery tanks. We wanted to keep a heavy-duty German theme going with this car, so what better way to do that than with German Field Grey paint? To make it seem even more rugged, it wouldn’t be a pearlescent paint job at all – it was going to be matte. Badass things don’t care about reflecting light.
And so Project X shuffled into the paint booth, where Luci started applying one of the more visually striking parts of the vehicle’s exterior.
The upcoming (and penultimate) chapter in the story of the X5 is coming soon, where we apply the finishing touches to the exterior and prep it for its eventual release onto the highways of southwest suburban Chicagoland.
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