1984 Suzuki SJ410

My first job obviously was to start on cleaning the interior, as it was filthy - the steering wheel had many years of handgunk on it, and on video chat with my girlfriend on the way home, she noticed the dirt on these.











I think that's about 0.01% of the work this car would need, and that was the easiest job of the lot. considering I bought this in July, and was expecting a couple of months of work, and it's now a year later, that's probably evidence this was hiding a lot of disappointments.

There's a pretty good market of stuff for these that you can bolt on, and a lot of 'NOS' Maruti parts you can get delivered in a week from India. They are branded Suzuki Maruti, but the quality isn't that good.

I went for a Facebook Marketplace bull bars because they were cheap.




I then decided to rent out a nice, modern garage that was airy, light and not leaking:



This would be it's home for the next year while I started doing irreversable things to it that made me wince.

So I turned my attention to the body metal to take my mind of the terrible paint job.
There was a lot of rust, but a lot of repairs over rust. The rear arches were plated over the rust with 2mm flat, bent metal. I hoped this wasn't the case, and that someone had cut it all out properly and welded new stuff onto clean stuff, but that was not the case as usual.



Here's what's hiding behind an adhesive headlining for 40 years.







There's pitting here and there, and one spot has gone right through to the other side. A death sentence for a roof. Unfortunately, there is more to come for the roof, further down.

I replaced all the outer arches (inner arches and plenny more welding to come):



I ran out of places to burn myself on my hands/arms so I set about taking the engine out. At this point, the chassis and body were going to remain as one, with no intention of cleaning up here. I never, ever intended to spend this much time on the car. There is so much work done between these posts, but I don't think it's that interesting.






While the engine was out, I cleaned up and sprayed the engine bay



Nice 'n' clean, but I'm afraid it was with 'Home Bargains' £1.99 gloss white rattle can. It will do for now!





The rear corners of the car were hanging, and it just felt like a non-stop discovery of more rust and they weren't going to weld themselves so I set at it.







Also, I forgot about the inner arches on the back. This was the biggest job on the car (apart from the driver/passenger floors), and was just horrible. I broke my welder about three times (gas bottle kept falling over and snapping the regulator off the top and the torch eventually just broke into bits), and felt like it was never going to end.




Doing these is rank really as you're constantly working in some kind of symmetry thing trying to make them look identical (I didn't), and there was a hole in the corner for the fuel pipe to go through. How I got everything lined up I never know, I'm an amateur welder and my fabrication skills are even worse. Anything unpleasant looking - that's what angle grinders are for, and there's also seam sealer. As long as it's completely solid and looked OK, I didn't care.

You have done a great job here. I think the more and more you do on a car as well the more you bond and fall in love with it.

Anyway cool thread keep it updated.

The next part was removing that terrible Rustoleum - do not use Rustoleum and paint rollers everyone. You will spend twice the amount of time removing it over actually painting it. Too soft to sand I had to take it off with a blade and eventually just a wire brush in an angle grinder. Horrible.
Oh, if you paint over Rustoleum with anything other than enamel, it'll react.







I spent some time rebulding brakes, axles and suspension, removing rust and spraying them a nice colour. This was a waste of time really as I took everything apart and rebuilt them again, but it was nice to look at:





Shortly after this, I got sick of looking at it and wanted to driver it, so I just covered the thing in grey primer, got the original wheels refurbed and with new tyres, put everything back together and then put it back on the road.










New suspension and engine felt like a different car! No joke really, such a good fun thing to hurl around corners, I miss it already.

I better start putting the chassis back together again. I cleaned up every single nut and bolt, and then got them all nickel plated. I assume this is now a complete 'nut and bolt' restoration then.

My pet hate is seeing kinked and bent brake pipes, so I spent some time on these:







I've rebuilt all the axles and replaced all the bushes with new ones, everything has had more or less a covering of Raptor. Not a big fan of bright colours, so reckon the light grey will look nice once they're peaking out from under the body:















New period Tokico shock absorbers in that amazing egg blue that a lot of Japanese components came in, in the 70's/80's.

Oh Suzuki, how you hide corrosion so well.

The roof is going to need repairing I think. This is on both sides, so I'm just going to cut both out and weld a complete strip of metal in.







Another bugbear of this body was a dent on the front passenger side roof. This leaves a gap of around 0.5cm around the door and you could bent the door in and not be able to close the window, or just have the rain/wind come on. This gives me an excuse to unstitch this area and pull it out.




This is the last of the rust now, I can't imagine any more hiding that I can't see now.

Also, my neighbour who builds Land Rover Defenders and whatnot cleaned and painted my bumpers.










Have taken these home to store as they'll only get damaged in the garage. Hurrah!

I have nothing to add, but pulling my jaw off the floor.


Incredibly well done.