FJ is complete

Here we have the stunning finished product. The FJ project really turned out nice. Its now ready for many more years of fun.

Bed lining the floor

 We were just about to wrap up the FJ with a spray in bedliner on the floors in the front seat and rear seating area when we came across a previous repair on the passenger side floor. Someone had used “Great Stuff” an expanding foam insulation to fill in a rather large hole in the passenger side floor board. Not an ideal repair but Im pretty sure it was an inexpensive one. Anyway, we couldnt leave the not so great stuff in there so we dug it all out and replaced it with metal. Once it was all welded in Jordan and Cole got to work prepping the rest of the floor for the bed liner.  We use a urethane product for things like this called Raptor liner. Its perfect for this application. It looks good, durable and water proof. We started with a coat of epoxy over the entire floor. Once dry, we applied 2 coats of the Raptor liner over the epoxy.  This will dry over night and we will spend the rest of the week putting the finishing touches on this project.

The end is near

Its been a long time coming, but the FJ is really starting to take shape. The left rear door has given us a little bit of trouble so we decided to just remove that part from the equation. The lower part of the door had been patched a couple of times and they were not really getting along so we cut out the whole section and replaced it. The body work portion of that repair is almost complete and should be in primer tomorrow.  The paint work on the body is now complete as well. We shot some color on this on Tuesday and it really looks nice. A coat of sealer was applied to create a uniform ground coat for the color. We started with the white masking it off for the Freeborn red once it was dry enough to tape on. We then unmasked the white and applied the PPG urethane clear coat. This thing really stands tall now. Today we installed the head lights, left rear side marker and tail lights, new body to door gaskets, stripped the grill and bumpers. The bumpers have served their purpose.  Lots of dents and body work were hiding under several layers of paint. All that was removed today and bodywork will start on them tomorrow. We will paint the doors, grill, head light doors, side vents and bumpers next week if all goes well.

Seeing more color

The FJ project is still moving along. Here you can see a little more color was sprayed this week. We are still prepping some places on the body and hope to have it painted on Tuesday. Things are looking pretty nice even though we cant fully disassemble the body because of the rarity of parts. Anytime we have a roof to paint, and especially if its one this big, we like to paint them by themselves. It just makes it nicer to be able to just concentrate on making the roof nice, then be able to focus later on painting the body. One of the doors is at Kellys, (our metal fabricator) to get some rust repaired that was in the bottom of the door. We should have that back the first of the week so we can get the body work fixed on it and have it ready to paint with the other door. Next week will be exciting to finally get color on here.