November 7

Since the last post we've done more stripping, more dissasembly and more thinking about the plan.  At this point, I am going for a decent looking, functional truck, not a show winner.  I've decided the front outer wing panels are going to take too much time for me to straighten, so I've ordered new ones and we'll save these for later attention and another project.  Here's what it looked like at the night of November 4, 2010:

You know, this may sound funny, but even though removing the bondo has revealed the true denty-ness of this truck, I have to say that it already looks better, take a look at the photo on the right and the one above and see if you don't agree.  At this point, most of the galvanized cappings are off, mostly stripped, and a minor amount of panel beating done. Oh, and about that beating.....

The evil end is on the right.  I won't say there's not a place for it if used judiciously, but it can do a lot of hard-to-undo mayhem.
Proceeding on, here's a few tidbits: the bolts holding the sill panels on are some of the most rusty and difficult to remove - quite a frustration for a simple thing.  I would recommend several days of penetrant soaking, I only allowed a few hours.
A FEW NOTES ON STRIPPING:
I've used two different strippers, the EFS-2500 and Citristrip you can get at the hardware store.  Both work pretty well, Citristip smells better, EFS-2500 stays wet much, much longer and is less messy to remove.  C-S kind of gets crumbly, where EFS lifts the paint and it comes off more "together".  I would not want to do a whole truck with C-S, but for small jobs I would go with it if I didn't have the EFS on hand.  I did find quite by accident that EFS is somehow extra-activated by sunlight.  We put some on the bed and in a bit found that the paint on the same panel was jumping off in the light, but hadn't changed in the shade - we quickly oriented the truck to take advantage!  I am convinced that if you could park your Rover in a greenhouse and spray it with EFS on a sunny day, your battle against paint would be over by days-end.  Seriously.

My favorite stripper....

The toughest paint on the truck is the original paint, but I will say that EFS and sunlight will kick it's ass.

One thing that you find getting into a project like this is that you're getting into Land Rover Archeology.  In this case, the truck's been used pretty hard, scraped a couple of trees, cab top beat to hell, front wings, used to beat up someone a lot bigger (read: the wings lost), yet multiple people have loved the truck.  There was three coats of exterior paint, someone took the time to paint the interior and the bed black prior to the last coat of overall red, along with the last painting, considerable effort was put into plastic surgery to restore that youthful appearance, there was a home-crafted headliner, there were auxillary taillights added.  But then there was the sadistic love applied with a grinder. A lot of this stuff makes you scratch your head, but to each their own.

Here's where it's at as of November 6:

Today, November 7, I put on and removed the last coat of stripper - YAAAY!  Now the truck will move to the next bay in the garage so I can get on the lift for final dissasembly.  The bulkhead and breakfast will come off for sandblasting, a bit of welding on the bulkhead, and powdercoating.  The bed will come off and more panel beating done, the chassis will be cleaned, de-rusted and a new rear crossmember welded on.  The cappings and other galvy parts will go to the galvanizers later in the week.

TOOL TIP:
I bought one of the Eastwood vibrating de-ruster machines, and I have to say there's no better way to polish your nuts.  This is the way things look going in:

And here's the way they come out:

Just remember to re-sack your nuts after polishing...  and tattoo your bag with the name of the place they go on the truck.    I have found that adding a bit of cleaner into the water in the vibrator does seem to work a bit better than water alone.  I have tried a small bit of GoJo, 409, and Oil Lift.  GoJo works ok, foams a little, 409 works good, foams a lot, oil lift does not foam and works great.  BTW, oil lift is a great product, became a beliver after de-oiling the fueselage of my Stearman with it.  Awsome stuff. Cleaning the bolts and other hardware is a must, either that or replace them all.  I prefer to use the originals, I just don't like the look of hardware-store bolts on these things, plus, it's a whole lot easier and nicer to re-assemble everything with clean stuff, and you'll save back the price of the machine and more by not having to buy repacements.  Of course you'll not avoid replacing some as I have twisted apart several bolts, and there are some already missing. Right now this thing is running 24/7, Land Rovers have a lot of nuts, and there's a lot of nuts that have Land Rovers...

So that's where it's at as of Nov. 7. Next will be more intricate disassembly and repair of components, but we're nearing the turnaround point, always a good thing to look forward to.