Behold! The donor body in all of it's glory
.
A couple of notes-
Good:
- The floor pan seems to be in good shape
- there are currently no known extra firewall holes (to be fair it has some awful insulation installed)
- The windshield leading edge is intact.
Bad:
- The donor has some rust over the rear door area that will need fixed, which is unfortunate.
- There is some A pillar rust that will need sorted on the left side
- The body is for a 100 series, not a 105, which means it very likely has the wrong transmission tunnel.
- The roof, while in much better shape, has some small rust holes.
- The body is not a tire carrier unit.
What does this mean? In my view it means that I very likely just traded one set of problems for another one. I am now waffling on if it's better to cut up the donor for the roof panel and keep the bones of the white body as was originally planned. This would avoid the issue of the tire carrier all together. With that said though, it is substantially easier to transplant a trans tunnel than it is a roof. All of this is food for thought I suppose. Whatever happens, the decision needs to be made quickly because the white body has been removed already.
Also of note is the need to replace the engine mount as well. The belief seems to have shifted to the viability of using an 80 series frame side mount. The only substantial difference seems to be the shape of the trailing edge of the mount being more compact on the 80 series unit. We're probably headed that direction. Compare the differences for yourselves.
80 Series 105 Series
As best as anyone I've been speaking with can tell that seems to be the only substantial difference between the two. The 105 unit also has two little locating tabs on the bottom of it but they serve no functional purpose on the truck. My bet is they are present as an artifact of manufacturing. If anyone knows anything regarding the differences in a real world application let me know please!
Last but not least comes the shifter hole. I am concerned about this on the new body because of the following info. On the GX 105 the shifter hole is different than on the GXL 105 trucks that have a different shift tower location. The only way to do a bolt in trans swap on a GXL truck is to use and H151 case from specifically an HDJ100. Now, this leads me to believe that all HDJ100 trucks are a GXL body. Is this the case for the FZJ100s though? I don't know, because they all came with an H series to begin with, and nobody seems to care as a result.
I suspect all that will need to happen is that the transmission tunnel is swapped, but then that brings us back to the question of which is better to swap and why. I think it may well be the roof because of the complexity of needing to swap over not only the tire carrier components but now also the trans tunnel. Why not do just one thing instead of two? Quite the predicament.