With the bolts in full retreat, Winchfield Engineering had a first look at the body panels.
Around the rear, with the wing panels and taligate removed, some more rust became visible.
This is behind the panel, so can be fixed with some fabrication rather than a replacement panel.
On the left you can see the end of the rear crossmember which will need some work to ensure the rust is completely removed
It looks worse than it is really, it should clean up fairly easily.
As you will have seen in the last post, a number of the large hinge and panel bolts are rusted solid, so Winchfield Engineering needed to get serious!
The restoration has started!
Winchfield Engineering has sent over the first batch of pictures from the work this week. If you recall, they asked me to strip as much as I could first so here is a reminder of where I had go to.
I had stripped off all the parts that I could easily remove including all of the interior apart from the dashboard and a few plastic clips used to retain the carpets etc.
The SJ was then loaded onto a trailer for the less than 1/2 mile trip to the restorers.
Before the work starts on the restoration, here is a walk-around video of the starting point. This is a "warts and all" video showing the bad points as well as the good, so there is some work ahead for Lil Red.