The epic of Ike!!

I drive a 1994 Ford Ranger, and his name is Ike. He's the vehicle I learned to drive stick shift, but at the time it was just a little practice vehicle for me. Then my dad bought it for me because he had helped replace tons of parts in it, so he knew it ran well. Due to all the replacements though he was a unique vehicle, sporting 5 or 6 different colors. He was three shades of green, off white, had some gray, and had a patch of rust on the side. At first I wasn't sure about driving around a milti-colored truck, but I warmed up to the idea cause he was just so awesome.

Then the next Summer came around, and all of a sudden father was like "Surprise!! We're getting the truck painted!!" He got referred to a guy who does a good job with paint jobs, by a guy that he works with. We went and checked the shop out and asked some questions then a week later I was having his seats taken out, and being sent over to the shop. I chose a nice metallic sonic blue color that I thought looked pretty cool in the sample booklet. Ike stayed there for four days getting painted and having his plastic bed liner replaced with some sort of spray on bed liner, and when he was done he looked really nice, but kinda lacked some of the personality that I had come to know and love.

This didn't last very long though because about 3 months later on November 13, 2008 I kinda had a little run in with a guard rail. It seems that circumstances piled against me because it was raining, I was going down a hill, and (unknown to me) my back brakes were completely out. After that we got it towed back to my dad's house, and eventually we started to do work on it. We had to straighten out the frame, fix the brakes, and get a new parts (fender, hood, headlight, etc.) After a bunch of work though, Ike was back in working order. We bought all the new parts from this warehouse type place in Baltimore, so to make sure the fender and hood wouldn't rust I had to spray paint them. We got a cheap can of sky blue spray paint, and that's what we used. Now Ike is back to being multi-colored with a sky blue hood and fender, the rest of his body being metallic blue, and his front grill being black.