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After enjoying my patrol for a few months, I started to notice the dreaded rust bubbles appearing on the outside of the 4x4, along with random flakes of rust falling on me while I was driving.
This is what it looked like from the outside: 73210017_529894624476974_2898862389451554816_n.jpg
I pulled the headliner and everything looked fine.
I used an inspection mirror to see down into the gap between the roof skin and the frame. Not even close to fine .
I made the mistake of poking at a few places with a screwdriver, and found a few places where someone had managed to make rust and filler take on the appearance of metal.
I started cutting some of it out with an air body saw: a-pillar.jpg
After seeing that mess, and what I saw with the inspection mirror, I decided that if I was going to fix this properly, the whole roof skin would have to come off.
Used a stripping disk to clean all the seam sealer and it's underlying layer of rust out of the gutters
Ground back the paint on all four corners to find the brazing line where the roof is attached to the pillers
Cut through the roof skin above the brazing line with a combination of air body saw and angle grinder
Removed the chunk of hillman hunter bonnet that the previous owner had pop-riveted over the very rusty sunroof
Removed the sunroof assembly
Went nuts with a spot weld removal drill bit - there are a lot of spot welds so this took me about a day of drilling
spot welds around the windscreen drilled out: windscreen.jpg
Once all the welds were gone, I stood on the back seat and shoved the roof skin upwards and backwards: roofectomy.jpg
Took the whole skin off and stuck it on the lawn: root.jpg
The plan from here:
- Weld in some temporary bracing
- Drill out spot welds and remove roof superstructure
- Strip off gutters
- Chop out all the rusty bits from the frame and weld in steel patches
- Fabricate some new gutters and weld them on to the frame
- Weld the roof superstructure back on
- Remove temporary bracing
- Chop out all the rust bits from the roof skin and weld in patches
- Weld the roof skin back on
- Drench everything in rust proofing
- Paint the outside of the thing
The Following 7 Users Say Thank You to Nhoward For This Useful Post:
Lawrence (21st March 2020), MB (16th March 2020), mudnut (23rd February 2020), MudRunnerTD (18th March 2020), Rossco (23rd February 2020), Sherro (8th March 2020), Touses (9th March 2020)
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