Sabre's Gen III Project: cladding removal and trail armor

Sabre

Overlanding Nurse
Our last trip to Moab reinforced the need to get both more ground clearance and more protection for the Montero. Of course, work, family and home projects come first, so I've put things off. This past summer we took a trip down the Oregon coast, camping in the woods. When we slid sideways off a narrow path in a densely-forested patch of big Doug firs, we came down on a huge exposed root and crumpled the rocker panel in front of the driver's side rear wheel. That gave me the gumption to take the Montero to its next logical level.

Here's the rig before removing the cladding. You can see how things hang down quite low.




Here's a showoff pic of me with Bill Burke. He's saying, "damn, Sabre, that crap really hangs down there!" Um, yes, Bill. Yes it does.



Oh yeah...note the chrome grill, mirrors, rear bumper center section and tail light housings. I hate chrome, so it's all going away.

Step One: Remove the damned cladding. I've always hated this stuff. With a little abuse it starts to look tawdry and requires reapplication of body molding tape and the stupid plastic fasteners behind them. It just looks crappy after a while and hangs down too low anyway, so off it came. Just some simple prying, some grunting, swearing, and sweat, and Bob's-your-uncle. Actually, the worst part of the job was removing the leftover 3M adhesive molding tape!





Now we're left with one thousand six hundred little holes.

No, not really one thousand six hundred. But there were something like 60 of them. Two different sizes of round holes in the doors and fenders, two different sizes of rectangular holes on the rocker panels, and some odd shapes and sizes on the sides of the front and rear bumpers. But hey look! More ground clearance already!





I will admit to being sort of anal retentive about certain things...I think my patients find this comforting. Anyway, I was NOT going to slap Bondo on those holes and call it good. No, they were going to be filled properly: by WELDING. Only problem was, I had never welded before. So I took a one-day "intro to MIG" class at the local technical college. Then I found a very nice welder on Craigslist that was pretty much new. It's a great machine...a 200-amp inverter welder that does MIG and stick welding, and has an optional spool gun, too. A good buddy in a local welding shop set me up with a tank; happily, my company gets a discount on gas since we have an account for oxygen. Next stop was the local scrap yard where I brought home a pile of steel and started running beads, learning the machine. My first project was a cart for the welder, which you'll see below.

I got this nifty little tip for spot welding that worked really well, standing the wire off the metal at exactly the same distance every time and making consistent welds much easier for this rank amateur. I didn't want to take the door skins off or rip out the innards, so it wasn't possible to buck the welds from the back with a copper dolly. I just practiced a lot on thin sheet stock and did my first welds on the underside of the rockers, where mistakes wouldn't be so obvious. Yes, I certainly did have my share of burn-throughs under there! But all in all, I was very pleased with the results.



What I did was to put the head of a nail (chosen to be the correct diameter) into the hole and pull it tight against the body by pulling on the nail's shank with a pair of ViceGrips. This gave a quick way to fill the hole and gave a base upon which to build up the little spot welds necessary to fill the hole above flush. A little grinding and sanding was all that was needed after that!





For the larger holes, I used bolts. I twisted them a few threads into the hole, tacked it in place, cut it off, and finished the weld. It worked really well!




Here, the rocker panel holes are done and sprayed with primer. Oh, I never took a "before" pic of the crunched rocker panel, but here's the "after" pic. The entire rocker under the passenger door (to the extreme right in the picture) was crunched upwards, jamming the door closed. A Harbor Freight sliding dent puller and a small sledge hammer did the rough work, followed by a LOT of welding to close up all the holes I'd drilled. When it was ready for finish, there was really a surprisingly small amount of Bondo on there! Not bad for a guy who's never done any body work before. Thank you, YouTube.



Of course, I did use filler for the holes in the bumpers. I backed it with some embedded metal mesh on the inside in the hope that the filler wouldn't pop out later. I'm thinking that the heavy coating of the stuff I chose to coat the bumpers will make that an utter impossibility. More on that later.



By the way, using an auto-darkening welding helmet on a sunny day is a total PITA.

The next step was to pull the bumpers. They come off quickly and easily. But before doing this, I cut a lot off the bottoms of them to increase ground clearance. This required fabricating new mounting brackets for the rear bumpers where they meet the rear wheel arches as well as configuring a new way of attaching the front finder liners. Just fiddly little stuff, easily done.




Now they're off and it's time to prep the body and bumpers for the application of bedliner. I had studied the options carefully and knew that I wanted something that was UV-stabilized and also wanted something as smooth as possible rather than chunky or gritty. Something with just a pebble texture if possible. I also wanted to choose a color that would complement the Montero's paint. The one I chose was Monstaliner. Yes, it's sort of expensive, but it is wonderful stuff, and comes as a kit that includes pretty much everything you need. If you follow the directions, it is VERY simple to use! It's a two-part urethane, massively tough and durable. Prep was simply a matter of cleaning with MEK, scuffing the surfaces (scuffers included in the kit!) and cleaning it again.

Let's do it!






Lastly, as long as the bumpers were off, I decided to get rid of the chrome on the grill, mirrors and rear tail lamp housings. I used satin trim paint. It looks great and is VERY tough stuff! I drove down a single track last month, really just blazing a trail through saplings that were 12 to 15 feet tall, and there's not a scratch on those mirrors!

OK, let's put it all back together. What do you think?


 
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Sabre

Overlanding Nurse
Oh yeah, since the grill was off I took the opportunity to get rid of the tinny little Mitsubishi horns. One of them had packed up, and the one remaining horn was so anemic that it was pathetic. I installed a pair (both high and low tones) of Fiamm Freeway Blasters. Now the Mighty Montero sounds like a Buick.



I also ditched the plastic "skid plate" (guffaw) under the engine and put my new-found metalworking skills to the test. Here's the result:



I fabbed up some mounting brackets on the front crossmember that were much beefier than the little tabs already on there.



Since the OEM plastic jobby is only attached at the front in the flimsiest of ways, I fabbed up some tubular extensions to position the new skidplate at the correct height.



I haven't picked up the proper mounting bolts yet (with rounded hex socket heads), but here's the thing in position.



The next step is to fab the protection that continues on toward the rear, but that has to wait for some nicer weather. Since I do all my work in the driveway, the weather shut me down for the winter.

But not before I fabbed up some sliders! The welding isn't what I had hoped for, but not too shabby considering that I ran out of wire and decided that it would be a great time to teach myself stick welding! It's, um, not as easy as MIG!



The actual slider is schedule 80 high-pressure refinery tubing, special stuff for the pressure vessels at the local refineries. I scored some new surplus at the scrap yard and used it rather than square tubing. It has massive strength. The stand-offs and nerf bar thingy are of a lighter schedule pipe, still plenty strong but not so heavy. Here they are in primer; they bolt in and will be welded to the frame after I get them painted.

Finally, though it's not exactly armor, here's a little project I whipped together before the weather shut me down. It's a low-profile rack that will replace the poor aluminum thing that's been up there. That thing has done yeoman duty but the offroad torture has ripped it apart. This one is designed to take a plastic poultry flooring insert and is plenty strong enough to use as a viewing platform for two people, the base of a rooftop tent, or for the usual purposes. I sized it so that it leaves the entire sunroof clear.



I'll add to this thread as I continue working on this stuff....
 
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Sabre

Overlanding Nurse
what do you bend piping with?
For the sliders to have the "kick out" on the nerf bar portion, I first bolted the things to the truck with only the center section of the bars welded...the ends were not yet cut to length and not attached to the sliders. Then I used the BFM: brute force method! I put a couple of come-alongs on the end of the pipe and used another vehicle as an anchor. The pipe was slowly pulled out to where I wanted it and I tacked the standoff parts in place, then removed the whole thing and finished the welds. Crude but effective...the pipe would crease if it needed to be bent much more.

Same method for the slight bends needed on the roof rack, though it's much lighter stuff and so does show the beginning of some distortion at the bends. Not pipe-bender perfect by any means, but fun to make, functional and fine enough looking IMHO.
 

Sabre

Overlanding Nurse
Thank you all! It was really fun.

lol sweet

another vehicle as anchor? do you have a pic?
Are you kidding? I had the wires on the two come-alongs bowstring tight...no time for pics cuz I worked fast. I was afraid of the whole thing letting go and killing me! :eek:

One was hooked to the front wheel and another to the rear wheel of the other truck, just to give it a bit of control over the angle I was trying to form (out and up a bit).

OSHA was not on the premises that day. :D
 
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Inyo_man

Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining.
Outstanding job!
I'm looking forward to spring time when you're back on your driveway.
 

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