Hello all. First post to the forum. So I have been helping some friends and family work on their cars lately, and I have rekindled my interest in restoring the old 1994 FZJ80 that’s been sitting in my mother’s driveway for years. I found this website and I’m inspired.
I remembered it being very rusty underneath, and I was wondering if the frame was rusted out to the point of being not structurally sound. I did some research on rusted frames and repairing them, etc. Basically what I learned was that if there are rusted out holes and large chunks that fall off or can be torn off by hand, forget about it. So I drove over there to check it out and took some pictures. I’m hoping I can get some opinions on how it looks.
I was dreading what I would find, but it actually doesn’t look too bad to me. However, I am a newbie at wrenching and with cruisers in general. I am willing to invest a lot of time, frustration, and a decent amount of money into making this drivable. I am not necessarily interested to restoring it to perfection; it’s really more of an educational endeavor - and I would have a cool drivable cruiser in the end.
It’s also not a question of buying the truck or not, since it already belongs to my family. The question is, does it look so bad that even a lot of time and money invested would end up with a cruiser that will continue to fall apart?
It has about 185,000 miles on it. We’ve had the thing for probably 15 years and as far as I know it was taken care of (for the first decade) and not used extensively for off-roading or towing. It has the A/TM K292 code on the VIN sticker and therefore does not have lockers (if my research is correct). Anyways, thanks for any advice.
I remembered it being very rusty underneath, and I was wondering if the frame was rusted out to the point of being not structurally sound. I did some research on rusted frames and repairing them, etc. Basically what I learned was that if there are rusted out holes and large chunks that fall off or can be torn off by hand, forget about it. So I drove over there to check it out and took some pictures. I’m hoping I can get some opinions on how it looks.
I was dreading what I would find, but it actually doesn’t look too bad to me. However, I am a newbie at wrenching and with cruisers in general. I am willing to invest a lot of time, frustration, and a decent amount of money into making this drivable. I am not necessarily interested to restoring it to perfection; it’s really more of an educational endeavor - and I would have a cool drivable cruiser in the end.
It’s also not a question of buying the truck or not, since it already belongs to my family. The question is, does it look so bad that even a lot of time and money invested would end up with a cruiser that will continue to fall apart?
It has about 185,000 miles on it. We’ve had the thing for probably 15 years and as far as I know it was taken care of (for the first decade) and not used extensively for off-roading or towing. It has the A/TM K292 code on the VIN sticker and therefore does not have lockers (if my research is correct). Anyways, thanks for any advice.
