Its cold around here and the striping business is slow this time of year.To keep my skills sharp I have been working on some trash cans. I have been making a pinstriping brush with a tiki handle on it for about a year now. and I've been painting a couple cans with a friki tiki theme to them. Cans seem to take forever for me. I've had the first one in the works for about 6 months, although I've only worked on it in my spare time, and I've been real busy the last year.
I've been motivated to do some cans by my good friend Jimmy C, of San Clemente Ca. Jimmy has been painting these cans for a long time. I am always amazed at the detail he puts in one of these pieces of art. I love his stuff! After 15 years I finally acquired a Jimmy can. its a real kool piece. check it out,, yes those are real bullet holes.
well back to work. One of the typical jobs i do is repair work on cars with painted pinstripes. i had one such job today. nothing exciting, but it fills the holes between the custom stuff. now back to painting the can ,, Man i could use a down-n-out burger about now.

One thing I want to post here are are photos of the projects I'm working on in my garage. Being a van freak since the early 70's, I've amassed a fair pile of them over the years. my most recent acquisition has been a custom van built in 1976 called the Flying Eagle 2. the van has quite a history and was owned and built by a painter by the name of Greg of Akron . He had a big influence on me as an artist. I really like his graphic style and use of colors. He was credited with painting the first murals on vans, way back when, and was quite famous in the vanning and drag racing circles. To acquire this van was quite exciting for me. It was in nearly every publication of the day.and traveled the U.S. to many shows. Then it was sold in 1978 and we never heard from it again. In 2002 it showed up on ebay as a salvage from a fire. A friend of mine , Blaino from Oregon ,bought it and he later offered it to me. Well to say the least I really wanted to restore the van and jumped at the chance. It had caught fire under the hood and the front was gone. the fire was caused by a fuel line failure. Nearly everything from the seats forward was replaced or repaired. I've posted some pictures of the van when i first got it. and i will post more of the resto.as i go along. I want to thank fellow club member Mike Nemic for all his help on the early part of this project. I wouldnt have done it without his help.

The Eagle was one of the first custom vans to have major body modifications including shaving off the drip rail. It won best of show at the 4th van nationals in Bowling Green Kentucky.July 1976. the van was repainted in 1978 , sold, then painted again in 2000 by Greg. which is the paint job on it now. I have plans to restore portions of the origional paint job before the van nats this summer. stay tuned to see if I make it.

After much prodding i have started a blog. thank you Mr. Mitchroney! As I am new at this I will be taking my time to put something of interest up here. This past weekend I made the trip to San Francisco to attend the pinstripers gathering at the cow palace in conjunction with the car show there. There were about 40 pinstripers and automotive artists on hand to paint panels , cans, and other weird stuff, including a car, to be auctioned off at the show, to benifit the make a wish foundation. They raised nearly 15,000 dollars by the time i left. Not bad for a first time event. hats off to everyone there and to artie for running the whole thing. (herbie herbie). thanks kenny for takin me to the sites. rode the cable cars(not enough). took the ferrie across the bay, and ate like a pig all weekend. You gotta have the cake log at the Claim Jumper! auggh.