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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!
In the picture on the left you can see a nut being held onto the bolt using MoleGrips.
They went around the SJ, welding nuts on all the stuck bolts
Here are some more pictures from the real week of work. The strip down continued around the SJ, removing all the panels that could be removed with simple tools. The remaining panels need some more extreme removal techniques to undo the corroded bolts.
On the left you can see the wheel arch after the wing has been removed. This area is the part where the wing meets the wheel arch and is a key area of corrosion. On lots of rusty SJs you can sit in the rear seats and look down and see the wheel and road through the corrosion holes. James' SJ is not bad but this will take a bit of cleaning up to attach to the brand new wings with all the rust removed.
On the right you can see the rear wing on the drivers side. This has the fuel filler in it. The filler is brazed in-place and we have a new one to braze into the wing. The square hole at the right of the picture is where the seat belt fits.
More dismantling!You may recall we bought new front wings and had to gamble on the Samurai wings (large wheel arch) being convertible to the SJ413 Wings (small wheel arch) and have the pressed in decorative curve line hidden under the large arch flange.
Therefore we wanted to check as early as we can in the process that the wing underneath the wide arches is, in fact, an SJ413 wing.
The picture on the left shows the wing with the wide arch (ie. a standard Samurai wing) and the additional narrow arch that I purchased.
The key difference between a Samurai wing and an SJ413 wing is the decorative pressing line around the arch which would be difficult to reproduce. However we believed that this pressing line is actually still there, hidden under the wider arch.
The spot welds were therefore drilled out on the arch.......
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.
All of a sudden its October and time for the second BigJimny meet this year. Many people asked for a south meet so we decided to give it another try. We had 40 Jimnys turn up on the Sunday morning for a meet-up and off-road drive. We had everything from shiny new Gen4 Jimnys through to SJs that have competed for many years in local trials.
