JoeDios.com Forums - Custom Paint Job...

Some of you may have seen these pictures already...

Several years ago I had a 1980 Chevrolet Suburban Silverado 2500. It was as lifted six inches using a shakle flip lift in the rear and springs in the front with Rancho RS900 nine point adjustable shocks and a sway bar removal kit. It was riding on a set of BFG 36x12.50x16s (36in diameter, 12.5 inches wide, on 16in rims). The drive train was a Chevy 350, bored over 60 with a SB400 crank, Edelbrock intake and carb, Dyna-Gear gear drive system, with a THM400 with reduced first gear for a better crawl ratio and a NP250 transfer case with both the front and rear axles locked by Detroit lockers. The rear end was a corporate 14 bolt with 4.10 gear ratio, the front was from a one ton military Chevy pick up called a CUCV (Commercial Utility Cargo Vehicle or Chevy's Ugly Camo Vehicle). The exhaust pipes were true dual pipes coming straight from the headers out the back end with no catalytic converters and sporting a set of huge glass packs. On the front I mounted a Warn 12,000lb electric winch. and had a set of custom skid plates across the bottom. I ordered a set of personalized plates for it that read NTPRIUS (anti-Prius). I called this thing "The Suburbanator."

The Suburbanator was a brute. It had the take off speed of your average turtle and most cars could beat its top end in reverse, but it could walk up walls. It could pull like nobody's business. It got ten miles to the gallon down hill with a good wind at its back. Because of the glass packs and straight pipes, it sounded like the Hell's Angles were coming down the road.

All that bad-ass-a-tiv-ness and it was wrapped in one of the ugliest colour combinations you could imagine. Sort of a tan and bronze two tone thing going on there. Remember, it did come at the tail end of the decade where all the kitchen appliances were Harvest Gold or Avacado Green and Disco was considered cool. And not for nostalgic reasons.

I decided I wanted to repaint the Suburbanator. A few years earlier I had a vehicle painted and chose a colour based on a small four by six inch card. The colour looked really cool on that card, but boy, was it hidious once applied. I didn't want to make that same mistake again. Now I had a digital camera and a computer with the power to hold pictures. I had a very primative photo editing software called Window's Paint...yeah, the same one that comes up in your photo viewer when you're looking at your photos. It wasn't the best, but it gave me a great idea as what my Sub would look like once it was painted. I started off with solid colours, then chose to go with a two tone pattern as there is a lot of metal on the side of a Suburban.

Then, out of boredom, I started getting creative...

So here's some colour schemes that might appeal to the members of this board......

I was going to put red fender flares on the Tiger Force version, but I had already drawn the mouth.