Brake and axle tear down.

So the next step was to completely disassemble the axles and brakes. I plan on upgrading the fronts to disc, just like I did on my Jeepster. I have the Jeepster's old 10" front backing plates which are going to be put on the back of Red. Should work great. Inside though, there's a lot of work to be done. New Tie Rods and king pin bearings are in order, along with new axle seals in the back. The fluid that come out of both diffs was black molasses. Certainly good that its all being re-done. The rear Dana 44 is being stuffed with a Lock-rite locker. No more open diff..but annoying ratchety noises when I go around corners...you just can't win at everything.

Here's both rear axles...the hubs wouldn't come off, so the backing plate had to come off with it.



The Front.


The rear.
All the loose parts are going to be powdercoated, and I took all of them down to my trusty self-serve sandblasting place for clean up. This is what comes out. Ready for coating.

Floors done, u-pol coating.

So at this point, the interior was masked off and sprayed down with u-pol truck bedliner. It's a 2 part bedliner that's thick and bulletproof. Works fantastic and I'd recommend it to anyone. If you've never used U-pol Raptor liner...it is badass. It is as thick as Rhino lining, you spray it with a provided spray gun in the kit that shoots at 65-70PSI...beautiful. Tough as hell. At this point, the gas tank was put in and secured.



After this, I fixed the 60 some year old turn signal with a little De-oxit and WD-40, and disassembled the brakes. Next step, get the brakes done.

Finishing the floors...

So the next two days of work were spent getting the rear fenders whipped into shape. The trouble here is that the previous owner decided to screw in these repair panels to cover the random rust holes in the inside fender long ago. Did he use galvanized or sheet steel? Nope...he used...aluminum. Super. Can't weld that. I would have just replaced both fenders with new replacements, but to do so requires welding to the walls of the tub, which means melted paint on the outside, which means I was going to be repainting Red before I wanted to. So I opted to fix them with some diamond plate left over from the Jeepster and make Franken-fenders! The bottom of the diamond plate strip is welded directly to the rear floor from the outside underneath. The top is then riveted to the aluminum portion and seam sealed. When its all done and coated in U-pol, it'll look nice.


Here you can see the front fender corners. The driver side (shown here) was really bad...the whole front side of the fender had to be cut out and replaced. Very low temp welding as the metal was paper thin. The edges were cleaned up with the plasma cutter and then ground down to make a nice edge. Right now the front edge is pretty ugly.


Here's the front of that bad fender...welded in...with the rust-ridden piece cut out to the left.


The final stage was to secure the two removable sections. The original system used cage nuts with bolts...and most of those were re-used. In the spots where new metal was put in, I simply used weld-nuts underneath and bolted down. After that was done, all visable seams and weld-joints were coated in seam sealer, and the bare metal surfaces got a mist-coat of etching primer, to prepare them for the U-pol truck bed coating that was next. Next step, to mask off everything that DOESN'T need coated, as the process of spraying U-pol can be messy.