Ride of the Week: Rescuing a Reef Blue Metallic F-350
Bringing a tired Reef Blue Metallic F-350 back to life requires a lot of time, parts hunting, and good old fashion elbow grease.
Welcome to Ford Truck Enthusiasts’ Ride of the Week where we showcase cool Fords owned by our amazing members. This week’s RotW comes courtesy of FTE member, OG Jason Lee, who posted about his Reef Blue Metallic F-350 in a thread titled, My Build, Til I Am Bored. Reef Blue Metallic remains an iconic 1990s Ford paint color thanks to, we’d argue, being available on the Fox Body Mustang. (Especially in Cobra form.) But like most things Ford, it was also an F-Series color as well.
Towing it back to New Orleans
Mr. Lee lives in New Orleans and wanted a truck for collecting wood and trash after hurricanes. Therefore, he needed something nice and clean, but nothing he couldn’t ding or dent. Enter this square-body F-350, which Mr. Lee originally thought was a 1996 CrewCab long bed. But after his friends brought the truck home from San Antonio, Mr. Lee discovered that, while the truck had a lot of modifications he was glad to find, the previous owner wasn’t an accurate seller (or clean person) —
[My friends] showed up back in New Orleans with [the F-350] at night time so I didn’t really get to check out the truck cause it was dark. I did however make my whole family get in for a ride and boy did it stink!!! Like homeless people were living in it or something. It was bad. I wanted to buy all kinds of things for it before it got here but thankfully I did not because the [previous owner] was pretty much wrong on everything he told me about. I was however 100 percent sure that I needed to get a tailgate since it only had the 5th wheel gate on it.
Before & After
That’s when Mr. Lee got to work, which you can follow along in his aforementioned thread. He started with a junkyard tailgate. Took out the carpet and the seats for a full degreasing and detailing. Added LED lighting wherever he could. Battled a leaking transmission pan and lose steering. Wrestled the F-350 home one day after a power-steering hose blew out. Ordered tons of parts from places like eBay and RockAuto. Fixed the brakes. Upgraded the stereo. And spent hours installing everything and giving the truck what he called “the Comet wash.”
That’s right, Mr. Lee washed the oxidized Reef Blue Metallic paint with Comet and then set about polishing the results with various Meguires products. Given how faded the truck was when he first saw it, he’s done an amazing job. He hasn’t updated his thread in the last few months, but here’s how it looked like about a year ago (these are the widest shots in the thread) —
To see more photos and updates on this truck, please make sure to click HERE!
How to Submit YOUR Ford for Ride of the Week!
- Head over to THIS THREAD in our Ride of the Week subforum!
- Post a comment with 4 or more PHOTOS (they should be widescreen and at least 1K pixels wide)
- Share as many details about your truck as you can (spec, mods, color, any stories)
- OPTIONAL – include links to any YouTube or Instagram videos
- OPTIONAL – feel free to share something about yourself
That’s it!
Thanks so much for reading and we hope to see your trucks here and all over the forum. Thank you so very much for being a part of the Ford Truck Enthusiasts community. You can also find us on —
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Photos: OG Jason Lee
