I'm glad some of you survived the frenetic slide show without ending up in the ER.
That was was a year long project back in 2013-2014. It was the cleaning and rust removal and recoating that slowed everything I removed down to glacial speeds.
The cruiser spent a year in Baja in 2012 camped on beaches next to the ocean with onshore breezes. You can see (as I could see growing everyday) how insanely corrosive the air is at the beach. I knew camping in paradise was going to wreak rust hell on my cruiser, but I thought, heck, I have a 26 year old cruiser, and if I can't camp this thing on the beach, I'm never going to be able to camp on a beach for the rest of my life. So I said F it, let it rust...and man...rust it did.
1. Radiator looked in bad shape....
That radiator was a brand new Toyota radiator I had installed in 2008. After a year at the beach, the salt air turned it to dust. I replaced it during the fix up with a new brass/copper CSF 2708.
I took my rusty parts to get replated with yellow cadmium at
Van Nuys Plating.
Powdercoating of the parts I couldn't (or wouldn't) paint was done by
Andrew's Powdercoating.
This project definitely fell victim to mission creep and wallet hemorrhaging. First it was the brakes, then the knuckles, then the clutch, then the this, then the that.... inevitable "while you're in there".
This project was getting expensive fast, as those of you who have been there can attest, so I had to make priorities. I would have loved to have yanked the block, since it was sitting right there, to have it rebuilt, but I had to draw the financial line somewhere, and I knew the old engine still had another 60-100k left in it till it HAD to get rebuilt.
The steering box seals had been replaced about 15 years ago and it doesn't leak, so I just removed it to strip and paint it. Sure, I would have liked to get it rebuilt, but had to focus on the highest priorities first (like polishing the valve cover
).
How much time was covered in the pictures?....
I took pictures of everything because all the rusty bolts and hardware were going into a bucket to get replated. I couldn't baggie and label everything. That was kind of hairball. So I mic'ed each bolt and took a picture of it after I removed it so I could put the correct bolt back in it's original location when I got a bucket full of shiny bolts back from the plater.
Making this vid was easy (it's always easy when you know how to do it). Just imported all the images with QuickTime Pro on the mac at 6fps and then pasted in a music track I ripped off from some other crappy YouTube vid with iMovie.
>>>
The cruiser now has been left out to pasture so to speak. A veteran of the war...a retiree enjoying the easy life in a snug garage. I don't drive it much nowadays. As I walk past it in the garage I can hear it snoring.... dreaming of past adventures we used to have in the wild, wild outdoors.
