The strip down starts - Restoration 29/04/2007
Written by Nigel Marsh Sunday, 04 July 2010 17:35
Today it began. The first thing was to strip it down, place all nuts and bolts in labelled containers and see a little closer exactly what I was about to face.
I was pleasantly surprised with what I found. The initial superficial inspection didn't really turn up anything particularly nasty.
After removing and storing the hard top and emptying the cab of all the spare parts The seats were removed. Only a couple of the seat bolts had rusted enough to prevent them being removed without ripping the welded nut underneath off. The seats appear to be missing the rear support brace and one of the latches to lock it down to the base.
There were tears in the vinyl, but this was always going to be replaced anyway, so it was no big deal. The back board that covers the petrol tank had torn vinyl, but had the original fastners, so I can re-use them. The latches to lock the doors from inside are missing, but at the time, it was a small peice of the puzzle, I figured that I could search for these smaller items as the need arose.
The dash dials, switches and cables all came out easily and were labelled up, the switches and dial connections themselves were also labelled. I wasn't sure what the conversion to negative from the current positive earth would entail, so I wanted to be careful here. The passenger floor looked rusted, but not through, so I figured that I could probably save it. The drivers side on the other hand had a heavy steel plate welded into place, but looking underneath only revealed a couple of small pin holes. More investigation will be needed later.
The sills looked o.k, but poking around from the inside showed that the inner sills might need replacing. The idea right now though was to get it stripped and assess the bodywork later, so I left it there for today.
What did I learn here? Nothing, I was too busy stripping a car. What I did learn several weeks later though, is that you shouldn't store nuts, bolts and other fixings in plastic lidded sectioned boxes and write what they are, even in permanent marker, over the top of the divided section. Several weeks/months of being in a garage where there's dust flying around moisture leaves the writing faded and usually indecipherable. I had a hell of a time identifying what was what. I'm sure I'll cover that at some time in this series. What I learned was to buy hundreds of those little resealable bags with a whitened section for writing on and put the bits in those. Much better and still readable even years later.
Nige
