Giving the Jimny a birthday

Well, it's been a long time coming.  Finally I've had enough time at home to start work on the much needed maintenance of the Jimny that has served me so well these past 9 years.  I've started the work and am still in the process of completing all the plans I've had for the past few years.  Hopefully now I'll have a lot more room in the garage with all the parts that have been sitting around waiting to be fitted.  The plan was to split the body from the chassis and get all the welding done that would cause many MOT failures for years to come on both the body and the chassis, if needed.  So on the 19th of Feb, I started my long and arduous journey.

on the 20th of Feb, I rolled the sorry looking chassis out of the shed and power washed all the grime off of it.  At this point, it didn't look to bad and couldn't really see any welding required with a squinted eyed visual of it.

Over that weekend, I hired a diesel compressor with needlegun and airline and proceeded to rattle all the rust off, it took 2 days, 1 day of laying on the ground, untill it started raining.  I then took the chassis back inside and spent the remaining day inside with the radio on to pass the hours.  The needles seemed to have found much more defects than I ever would have by tapping around with a hammer.  So many holes........

On the 22nd, I decided that I was going to try out welding and managed to source a stick welder from a friend, tried this out and could not get a decent weld.  Knowing next to nothing about welding, I then managed to source a MIG welder and had a go at it with that.  I seemed to get some ok results, so spent half a day learning how to use it and proceeded to start my journey as a fabricator/welder wannabe.  Nowhere near good enough to charge for work, but good enough to repairs that will be nicely coated with paint.

I started to get a bit more confident with the patch work quilting I was doing on the chassis and decided to go for something structural.  The pipe holding up the fuel tank didnt look like it was doing to well at one side, so I cut it off.  I found a bit of pipe laying around that wasn't the right diameter, but it was the right thickness, so i sliced it and ground chunks out of it until it was the (just under) right diameter, knocked it in from the side and through into the remaining pipe and welded it in place. So at least if the weld does fail, it will still have some support.

on the 26th, the panhard rod bracket at the rear needed some attention.  I forgot to take a pic of the finished product, but essentially I just bent a flat piece of metal a couple of times and smashed it with a hammer against the existing bracket to make it look the same and cut off the excess so it fitted neatly enough and welded it on.