Samurai Tub Body Work
Just a few pictures to show how the top of the tub is being fixed. I guess at some point in the past one of the previous owners (POs) had either snapped the hard top bolts or the soft top snaps in the top of the tub. Then, in order to “fix” the problem the PO drilled a massive hole and inserted a rubberized well nut into the hole for the hard top to be attached. The soft top was definately not an option with this set up. This was very annoying to me – I wanted the soft top!
Anyway, here are some images of what the new steel that I banged out looks like just before riveting them on the tub. In the first image you can see the big holes for the well nuts under the roll bar.
This image is a close up of the previous one.
The steel is a peice of galvanized that my buddy Dave bent up at his heating duct company (Mastron Metal, Ottawa, Ontario). You can see the new holes where the snaps will screw into this peice of steel. On the other side of the steel is some small nuts that I welded onto the peice with the MIG welder. Pretty fine work for an amateur like me, I had to cut off the welded/botched nuts a few times and the final ones I ended up hainvg to “chase” the threads to correct the heat deformation of the nuts. The nuts and bolts are 5mm x 0.8 pitch. Small stuff. By the time I did the last one I had the technique down, the other side should go smoothly.
You can also see that I’ve ground/cut off the factory fender flares (and loads of underlying PO installed bondo/fiberglass). With the new tire and wheel combination the tires stick out past the stock flare by about 3 inches. I am going to reshape the fender opening to accept a Jeep YJ flare. I was thinking about mounting the flare high so that I could run a 35 inch tire without any additional lift but 33 inch tires are probably big enough for my uses of the truck. I would be worried about the 35 inch tire taking too much away from the braking – even with the planned rear disk conversion. This truck will be used for towing trailers and stuff so the brakes need to be good.
Here is a picture of my friend Jeff holding the flare in rough position to get an idea what it is going to look like.
You can also see the new tire and wheel combination here. The tires are the same 33×9.5×15 BFG A/Ts that I’ve always run but wheels are Ford F150 4×4 rims from the 1970s. I still have to track down a spare wheel for the tailgate and another set for the Sidekick that you can see in the background of these images.
Here are a few more images just for look.
I have gotten a lot more stuff done since these pictures were taken. I’ll post when I get the images.