As mentioned under repairs a 25+ year old vehicle isn’t factory new. After we had a lot of fun driving our Pinz in the nearby mountains and desert we decided that if we want to keep it as long as possible a complete restauration had to be done. Not that our truck is in bad shape, it’s probably at the upper end of what you get from the Swiss Army but still.........
Planned activities:
- remove the entire top of the truck (windshield, roll bars, door tops, bed sides, doors, rub rails)
- clean all parts remaining on the truck from eventual rust and strip as much paint as possible
- prime everything twice with por15
- spray paint the complete lower body with Awlgrip 545 Epoxy primer white and then Federal Yellow
- paint the cab interior in Forest Green
- have the bed and cab floor sprayed with spray-in bedliner in black
- spray paint the front roll bars, rear and front bumbers, tail light plates and battery box in Forest Green
- strip and prep the remaining parts and spray paint them in Federal Yellow
- assemble all painted parts
- make new rub-rails from Trex and install them with new SS hardware
- improve driver/passenger seats??
- rebuilt the rear seats
Whenever non-structural bolts or nuts are removed we will replace them with SS hardware.
As you can see, quite a project! Whenever something can be shown the appropriate line above will be a link to a photo/text page. We share the effort and experiences we made during this restoration to encourage others to restore their trucks bottom up too. It’s a lot of work but at the end you will have a truck to be proud off and which won’t have rust problems for the years to come.
© 2002-2005, K. Juergen Schoepf