I really do love it though. It gives my hands something to do that frees my minds eye to wander around all willy-nilly. Granted, this leads to a lot of time staring at my truck and thinking endlessly, and I'm gonna share one of those trips with you but first I should show you that progress is being made.
So as I'm working this side of the bed, I spend a lot of time looking at the tailgate. This tailgate is a mess. Not the whole thing, but the inset part that says "Jeep" is just a mess. It's got about a thousand little dings in it and a ton of them are on the ridges. If I'm honest with you all and myself, I doubt I could ever smack it all straight regardless of how long I spend with all my shaping and shrinking tools. I'm fairly well convinced that even if I tried, and I mean honestly gave it my best, I'd wind up with an oven pan wow in the panel. Knock it down here and it pops out over there. Also, it's only one panel thick, so filler is out of the question. A low spot I can fill is a high spot on the other side. The more I look at it, the less I like it. The "Jeep" I mean.
Seriously, I get more love from the AMC and Rambler guys than I ever do from the Wrongler guys, and when people think "Jeep" they think Wrongler. I know that we got baby jeep/FSJ driving hybrids around here (not pointing any fingers, Stuka!
), but every Marlin or even Gremlin driver I chase down knows what my truck is, I haven't had a single Wrongler driver come up to me at the gas station and not call my truck a "Comanche". 
That's not the meat of why I don't like the "Jeep" on the back of my truck anymore. If you've read this whole thread you know I got a lot of gear head neighbors, but I have even more "gear head pretend to be" neighbors. Every weekend I have to tell the same story to another doofus that asks me "Is that an old (insert big three here)?" while they look at the tailgate that says Jeep! I'm sick of telling that story and I want to tell a different one to the next Doofus that comes along.
And since I use my truck like a TRUCK I've decided I'm gonna chop it out and buzz in some 1/8" sheet, making it very hard to dent in the future. This has left me with the quantry of what marque to splay across the posterior and LOTS of sanding time to think about it!I'm sure that for the short term I'm just gonna rattle can the flat tan to protect it all and make it all one color, but with so much time and the necessary skills to make my dreams a reality, my dreams have gotten pretty far out. I guess to explain my style, I tuck my shirt in, I wear a belt, I'm tatted up both arms and pretty much everything but my head and hands. I love Rockabilly music, harlequin diamonds, nautical stars, big fat metal flake paint (think of a 70's bowling ball for metal flake size) and feel that the more colors in a custom paint job, the better.
Since I've been staring at the rear end of my truck for so long, that's pretty much all I can envision with paint on it but the drive to see it was getting so bad that I almost mocked it up with different colors of primer. I grabbed a $6 roll of striping tape out of my tool box, and only when I remembered that that little roll of 1/8" vinyl cost $6 did I remember that I have sketchbooks for that kind of nonsense. Anyways. Here's what's been in my minds eye lately.
While I was drawing these, one of my tuner-tool neighbors was trying to dial in his newer bigger fart can by revving the snot out of his neon. I can tell he got another bazillion horsepower by the way the muffler sticks out six inches past his bumper and bounces up and down relative to his car when he goes over a bump. That's what inspired this little flip-off:
If it's not a little obvious, I miss my 66' Ambo from time to time, even though it never ran as good and as fast as my J-10!
great googley moogley, coffee out my nose! 
