2014 Nissan Juke

The final piece to the under-hood arrangement!  An Injen strut bar to bear my logo and brand the whole Jukeys engine art piece experience.

 

Momma agreed to buy me a strut bar for Xmas.  She wasn’t nearly as excited about it as I was.  To her, it was a worthless piece of metal.  To me, it was an experimental art project.

 

I had my business name laser cut out of 1/8″ acrylic and then carefully applied a super strong multi-material two-part epoxy to the lettering with a toothpick.  It was then clamped in place for 24 hours to permanently bond.

 

The next step was to cover the thing in SlickSand high build polyester primer in order to make the letters ‘blend’ into the strut bar more smoothly.  Fill the gaps, if you will.  Unfortunately, my primer gun was acting afool that day and it ended up super splotchy and uneven so I had to compensate by going SUPER heavy… Which led to a LOT of extra sanding so the letters wouldn’t look all bubbly and round.  A lot of that sanding was done with a pick tool with a 1/4″ square piece of sandpaper attached.  Not the most enjoyable activity, but not anything to cry about.

 

Then the whole thing got several coats of single stage red paint and then block sanded with 800grit to remove the pesky bubble look effect.

 

Then the blue!  Good old reliable trusty blue.  Same beautiful blue to match everything I’ve painted to date.

 

I block sanded the lettering to break through the blue base coat to the red.  Then clear coated over the whole thing, sealing it shut and completing the paint work on the strut bar!

 

I had the end mounting plates powdercoated in a semi-gloss black.

 

Got it installed on the Jukeys and couldn’t be happier with the result.  It brands the underhood presentation and offers a splash of red to draw just enough attention.  Not to mention the handling improvement provided by strengthening up the chassis.  The finishing touch!

 

Well, I think that about wraps up all the work on the engine.  Finally!  Now I can move on to even more fun stuff…. 😀

 

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