Project Pickle - bonnet and doors - the last bits (part 9.6)

The last missing bits (as the title implies) were the bonnet and the doors. Among the few visible reasons why this car was taken off the road and subsequently didn't sell at the dealer, was the fact that a tree branch or the like must have fallen onto the bonnet, bent it badly and most likely on the way down managed to crack the windscreen. 

As I am not entirely sure what the future might bring, I deliberately bought a later 413/Samurai hood, because it as a little bump in the middle, which is necessary, if one wanted to install a 1.3 or 1.6L engine at some point. 

Of course, it was reasonably priced because it needed some work. Aside from two small bolt holes each side, where some external hood latches were bolted on, it was rusted through in the middle where the Suzuki emblem would have been. 

Plus a layer (or three) of paint and it's good to go again.

Installation is just four bolts.

And because we were already near a concrete fence post, it was time to straighten the left frame horn where the bumper mounts to... redneck style. ( F=m*a ) and you can achieve quite some acceleration, when you have two or three meters of rope...

Last step: the doors. Disassembly is very straight forward.

Two m6 bolts at the bottom of the sliding mechanism.

Remove both weather strips.

Window comes out.

... and paint(ed).

Lastly: Install the front and rear windows. Which, quite frankly is brilliantly easy, if you a) install new rubber on the window a few days before, b) lube it plenty and c) have a car with flat glass. For the rear window, we didn't even have to use string to get it in. On the front, we had to revert to the original seal as the aftermarket one was just a smidge too big for the window frame. 

There you go, one freshly painted Suzuki SJ410 and to be honest posting about all of this felt like it took longer than the actual work.

Coming up next time: BMW e36 seats in a little Suzuki.

Project Pickle - grill time (part 9.5)

With the rest of the car being tackled paint-wise, it was time to address to the situation at the front. Because it fit quite well on the old front wings, I had decided to stick with the original grill. As I had already suspected the little truck must have had a most likely not so little crash as the front left frame end was a bit bent. With two new front wings it became rather apparent that the grill wasn't even remotely as straight as I had originally thought. 

But first: drilling out snapped bolts. 

After "some" bending, hammering and redrilling of the mounting holes, the grill was back to the point where it could at least be somewhat attached to the front. 

Should be rather obvious what I meant, when I wrote "kind of attached"...

Not sure why, but the bottom end had to be narrowed down quite a bit in order to fit. 

As usual: the previous owners' strategy for rust treatment was to slather it in bondo, so this meant even more work by fixing dozens of pin holes and grinding them flat again.

On the upside, if the paint works as intended, the results are pretty spectacular.

... and lastly because the stock plastic door handles absolutely s*ck, I ordered the metal ones as fitted to the Indian Army Maruti Gipsy. 

Project Pickle - backdoor action (part 9.4)

In the strictest sense this was an unnecessary purchase. I mean the Pickle came with a completely bent and rusty backdoor and whilst it is bad, it is definitely still salvageable . Yet still a much better one came up (almost) locally.

Here's one for those who are afraid of taking out glass on your own: Don't be. The rubber was too hard, to just be able to push it out, but with a bit soapy water and a spatula, I pryed the rubber off the glass where it was stuck on really good. After that it was literally just as the picture suggests: fold the rubber over and slowly work your way round. Much easier with two or three of those, so the old rubber doesn't snap back into place all the time.

Remember (or better mark) the orientation of both the rubber seal and the window and reinstall will hardly be a ten minute job. Also: store the gasket installed on the plane of glass this makes it much less likely to chip a corner or the like.

As it came without a door handle or locking mechanism, I took all of that from the original rear door. There's really just two important clips you have to be aware of: the red one for the actual door handle and the metal clip holding the actual locking barrel in place.

Once you know how to do it, the whole paint and primer thing is pretty straightforward.

As you can see in the background, I wrapped the car up and sprayed the roof again. (Ultimately doing it two or three times just to make sure.)

To be fair, if the individual components react the way they are supposed to, the results are pretty good. 

In defense of the seller of the backdoor, it was never advertised as accident free, but removing the bondo definitely shaved off a pound or more (seriously) and pushing it back made it look a lot less worse than it was.

Project Pickle - not going to win an award for most daring choice of color (part 9.3)

 So rolling the paint onto the warmed up body yielded some mostly acceptable results. 

Until the paint started to flash off. It appears that it started to chemically react with the primer and the bubbles being the result of some weird off-gassing.

So what do you do in this situation? That's right, you stubbornly ignore the facts and continue to paint the roof in cream color and realize it's only bad the first the first time, but if you then roll it another time... it ends up being remotely acceptable. Which was good news because I had to roll the roof on the inside anyway.

Let me just reiterate one more thing: only absolute idiots paint cars in multiple colors and doing it again is definitely not a testament to me being capable of learning from my own mistakes. BUT I had one of those "talks" with my paint dealer, which resulted in both of us having a long phone call with the manufacturer, who demanded some pictures and then informed me about my mistakes regarding how I mixed and applied the primer. But it resulted in me getting the black paint for the floor for free as they said that still it shouldn't have caused problems to this extent.

And whilst I was at it, I also painted the firewall black.

To be fair the results were a lot more in line with what I experienced the last time. Whilst I was fully aware that I wouldn't be able to save the paintjob on the outside this gave me the hope that I could make it "usable". So another coat it is, but this time sprayed on.

It turned out much as one would expect: a bit 3.6 Roentgen - not great, not terrible, but only if you have ignore the futility of the attempt. At least this bit wouldn't rust immediately, because of the millions of pin holes.

Classic case of this really being one of the hardest lessons: To sometimes accept defeat and keep moving on. (As depressed as this may sound it has kind of grown on me - definitely not something anybody else would copy on purpose.)