I am progressing at a leisurely pace on the Range Rover Restoration Part Duex. I have run out of funds for now and have changed gears a bit. I am now working on stuff that doesn’t require any supplies. Its also kinda hard to be motivated to “bust it out” when the temperature is 100+F in the garage. As RovErica said to me the other day when she came home after a long drive around town in her unairconditioned Ford Taurus, “I’m sweating balls out there.” As she said that, I remembered the good old days when I didn’t have air conditioning. Ahhh memories. Nothing motivates a kid more than suffering.
I have started to organize the pictures so the tasks can be broken down in to manageable pieces. This hopefully will prevent me from having novel sized posts about rust removal. I know WTH! I know how you all love to read about grinding rust but I’m sorry you will have to get your War and Peace sized fix of minutia of rust removal from some Jaguar or Jeep website.
With some new tools, I have decided I could proceed with the rust portion of the project and pull the carpets in the front of the Rover and see what kind of damage is up there. I was NOT surprised to find rust. I was surprised to find holes. The good news is it was only two holes. The bad news is they are not in easy places to work. I also believe before long another seam will begin producing holes.
This is a picture underneath the passenger side seat. You can see the hole in the floor and the rust along the seam there. There is a bit of rust a little further back that is even worse than this. Therefore the entire passenger side seat and electrics will need to be removed to get to the problem spots. If I don’t, its only a matter of time before my passenger is ejected through the floor board. I only allow people I ACTUALLY LIKE to ride with me in the Range Rover so I should really try to fix this correctly. While I’m at it, I think moving the engine management computer to place higher up would be prudent. We’ll see how that all pans out when I get closer to reassembly.
I pulled the carpets and mats and to my surprise they were still wet two weeks after the last rain. We have had 90 plus degree heat for over a month and except for a drive during the flash flooding on July 4th she has just sat in the driveway. We did have quite a bit of rain during the early part of the month so I have to assume this rain is coming from somewhere above the rust. My first guess is the windshield seal. So add to the list of things to do, pulling the windshield and replacing the seam. More expense and more time. This will have to be professionally done for I have no way to pull the windshield. The guys across the pond on the TV show Wheeler Dealer hire this out and I will take their lead and do the same. If it’s good enough for Edd China, its good enough for me.
So with wet carpet and very, very wet sound pads coming out, are we at all surprised there is rust on the floor boards? Rhetorical question! Lets get a look at it.
In these pictures there is a pre and a post picture. The PRE pictures are before any grinding was done. There were some pads glued to the floor and they were very rusted underneath. The goal was to get to bare metal and remove the rust. I will probably hit all this one more time before the acid etching primer goes down and the entire area is covered in new sound deadening material.
Driver’s side
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Passenger’s side
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I mentioned two holes. It was somewhat comforting to find the stainless steel screw that holds the seat facia firmly embedded in the rusty metal. Here are the pre and post pics for each hole.
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I think perhaps it looks worse than it really is. I stopped by JagGuy’s shop on Saturday to show him the pictures of all this rust. He said, “That ain’t rust.” He proceeded to show me a Jaguar with rust so bad entire sections of the body were gone. The surface rust I had was not even to be concerned about in his eyes. He says a liberal application of Rustoleum paint will slow down the rust. Even better would be some Waxoyl or the like. I’m still investigating which one I will go with.
So overall I felt pretty good about that. But he had not seen the footwell pictures yet. He had only seen the pictures from the rear of the Range Rover. And those my friends, will be in the next blog post.
Stay warm and Happy Rovering.