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.

Over the next 2 days on the 27th and 28th, I stocked up on wire brushes, griding discs and flapper wheels and went to town on the remaining surface corrosion in preparation for the paint job.  The underseal that was on the sides of the chassis was an absolute pain to come off, I had to use a hammer and chisel to get the most of it off, so that it wouldn't gum up my grinder.  That took such a long time to do.  I got bored of that and now can't stand my old grinder, so I went out and bought a new one that doesn't give you HAVS (hand arm vibration syndrome) so quickly.  Checking on the HSE website, I found that I could only use my old grinder for just under 2 hours a day before it went over the vibration exposure limit.  My new grinder however allows me 6 hours per day, however, I'm sick of grinding and buffing now and can't seem me ever reaching that limit again, so hopefully my chances of getting white finger are greatly reduced.

On the 27th Feb, I mixed up half of my 5 ltr of epoxy paint and spent the next 3 hours hurrily slapping on as much paint before it cured in the pot. Luckily, I managed to finish it all off (including checking for missed bits) as it was just starting to thicken up in the pot.  The finished product doesn't look too bad at all.  Hopefully the MOT inspector will think along the same lines.  The paint looks quite shiny as it's still wet.  It's a wintergrade jotamastic 87 that can be applied in lower temperatures and should harden up much better than normal paints as it's marine grade for use in salt water environments, ideal as I live on the coast, which is evident by the volume of rust that was on the chassis when I started

on the 28th, I replaced the crankshaft oil seal and fitted new belts.  Got my oil seal from the bigjimny shop.  It wasn't leaking, but I thought, might as well do it now whilst it's easy to get to.  To get the pulley off, I found a small crowbar/podger with a flat end on one side, stuck the flat end in one of the slits of the pulley wheel, so that the pointy end of the podger was pointing directly ahead of the motor and when that slit was at the bottom of it's rotation, I managed to get some purchase against a depression in the block and cracked the bolt loose using a breaker bar with the correct sized socket. Once that was changed and the belts were on, I removed my jammed A/C compressor from the engine block and soaked it in oil in preparation to have it looked at on a later date.  I didn't take any pictures of any of these things as I was just pottering around that day waiting for the paint to dry properly.

Today 3rd March, I decided to not mess about with rusty bolts when taking off the front axle as it didn't look like it had been touched since the jimny left the factory. I relentlessly wielded the angle grinders cutting disc at every bolt that got in my way and successfuly saved hours of pain and hurt.

The radius arm bushes were pushed out, complete with the old metal bushings and cleaned the recesses up in preparation for receiving new bushes.

Looking good. It's on my list of things to do in a few years time.

Thanks Lambert,

It's been a long time coming for mine, I've been meaning to start for years.  Two weeks in and I'm still only 3/4 done on the chassis.  Still have the body to do as there's so much rust on there, lots more grinding to do unfortunately. Not looking forwards to doing that, but thankfully the ramp in the shed I'm renting is making it so much more bearable.