Pistachio: a 1980 FJ40 from Venezuela (1 Viewer)

[albertoignacio]

Someone wrote in here the wise words to not buy the first FJ40 you see. Needless to say, we failed to follow this advice and ended up with this odd situation.

The 40 we purchased in June 2018 looked beautiful for the asking price, so a friend and I proceeded to buy it, but there's a catch. The previous owners were "restoring it", which to them meant to paint the body (I don't know how many years ago..), replace some random chromed parts (hood latches, door handles, side mirrors), but mostly aesthetic fixes.

The catch is that the engine stalls and doesn't run properly, it didn't have any brakes, no battery installed and,the wiring was a total mess.... many other little things included like a cracked exhaust, bent rims which made the tires lose air, terrible tires, and many other things. Makes me ask the question who the hell invests money into making the car look good when it doesn't even run? Luckily, they decided to sell it to us.

In the end we bought it (June 2018) and have since got it running nicely. This thread is to share the story and to get your opinion since we have lots to do still.

Here are some pictures:

First day we saw it. Looks great doesn't it?

Engine bay looks nice, wiring is crap, battery is from another vehicle.

PO painted over rust, lots of cheap bondo fix, but we decided to leave it as is for now. Get it running, maybe in the future we'll take care of the body.

Underneath looks good. A few nuts and bolts missing, but nothing major.

The day we bought it, next to my 2010 Toyota Hilux

 

[albertoignacio]

First things we decided to tackle were:

1. Get the engine runnning properly.
2. Overhaul the brake system
3. Inspect the drivetrain

Luckily, the mechanic we brought in suggessted we focus on the carb and not to open the engine yet. The engine sometimes ran, but would stall at idle, or stoplights, or sometimes suddently. Getting the carb cleaned help a lot and eventually got it idle nicely.

Next, brake system: The 40 has stock drum brakes front and back and we decided to overhaul instead of replacing with disk brakes. Maybe in the future, but not yet. Unlike the US, 1980s still had drums instead of disks here in Venezuela. We installed New drum shoes, new pistons, new brake lines, new brake booster and serviced the drums. Result: enough braking power to lock the tires.

bonus: something we hadn't noticed really, but it has both original plates from 1980, it even has the stickers from 1986.

Regarding the drive train, we didn't feel the need to take apart the transfer or the transmission. but we did replace the driveshafts (one from am FJ40, one from an FJ70) and replaced all U-joints. the rear diff did require dissassembly.

Original Rear plates from the 1980s

New pistons, new studs, etc.

New brake master: not OEM but will work for now

diff disassembly

 

[FJ404345]

Congrats !

Never saw a rear license plate holder adapted like that before !

 

[albertoignacio]

Never saw a rear license plate holder adapted like that before !

Hi FJ404345, slightly different it seems. We still need to mount the plate lights there but not prioritizing it. Still need to get everything functioning properly.

Regarding wiring, I must accept it did not in any way go as planned. The original wiring was a mess, had been painted over, had lots of exposed and damaged wire so initially our solution was to completely replace the wiring harness with a EZ Wiring 21 Standard Harness. Somewhere we had read that it had been successfully installed before in an FJ and decided to go ahead with it. While the harness looked good and (in theory) all the connections we needed, we imagined it would be fairly simple.

Now, while neither of us are electricians of sort, we hired a person to do all the wiring. Problem was that he had no idea what he was doing either and just wanted the work. In the end, we found a wiring harness specialist and he wired the entire vehicle for us. It functions properly, but to be honest, I would be willing to redo the entire wiring as it doesn't look stock, the fuse box ended up in a very odd location (near the passenger's feet, underneath the glovebox) and I would like to protect the wires around the vehicle. In summary, we seriously understimated the work needed in the wiring harness and even though we "finished" wiring back in December 2019, we still have work to do on it (some gauges don't function) although the majority does work and very well (lighting, ignition, brake lights, intermittent, majority of the dash, etc).

some pics:

What we were facing...

Under the dash:

Unboxing the wiring harness. Each wire comes individually labeled.

First day wiring: We decided to mount the fuse box on the passenger side because there's little space in the Original location.

 

[albertoignacio]

Some pictures of the "final" result. Cleaner wiring overall. The fuse box is in a temporary location, we want to buy or a fab a better attachment plate for the fuse box so we don't have to drill the firewall. New battery, plus cleaner wiring definitely changes the looks of the engine bay.

 

[albertoignacio]

Additionally, we bought new tires General Grabber AT2s in 31x10,50 R15 and painted the rims light grey. Love the way it looks!

Flat tires and ugly rims when we bought it.

Painted rims and new tires