Restoring My 1994 Jeep Wrangler
I bought a Jeep Wrangler the summer before my Senior year of high school and restored it during the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore year of college. It suffered from rust on the entire undercarriage and the clear coat of the paint was peeling off the hood. At that time it was already 15 years old and needed a good tune-up. Not thinking at the time, I never took any pictures of the entire jeep before and only considered documenting my work after I began. This whole project was done at my house using tools we owned. I began the project by taking the entire Jeep apart and sand blasted all of the undercarriage. To give you an idea of how bad my Jeep was, here are a few pictures of the rust damage. Much of this was due to the previous owner driving off-road in water. The bottom right image is a picture of a half sandblasted undercarriage plate. The left side is a freshly sandblasted metal surface while the right side is what the entire underneath of the jeep looked like.
Sandblasting:
Taking it Apart: Learning how to sandblast was a great skill to acquire. Each piece was sandblasted, painted with primer, and then painted with heavy duty anti-rust black paint. Next we removed all of the plastic fenders, hardtop, front windshield, seats, etc. The top left picture is my father and grandfather. My father and I did all of the work in a few weeks time. The rest of the pictures you can see the newly painted undercarriage.
The inside floor had rust spots and needed a good painting. The carpet was old and needed to be replaced. I took a Di-grinder and removed all old paint and rust from the floor of the Jeep.
The outside of the Jeep also had some minor rust damage and the paint was fading. I had sanded the hood and spot sandblasted areas where there were rust spots. We also lightly hand sanded the entire outside of the Jeep so the new paint could adhere properly.
All of the seals on the car were shot so I purchased an entire seal replacement package. The package contained all window, trim, hard top, and door seals. The pictures below show how dry-rotted the old seals were.
When we were taking of the seals, we found additional rusting underneath the window hinges.
Painting: Now it was painting time! My dad owns some professional paint sprayers that he used to paint the car. We first needed to prep the painting process by covering everything we didn't want paint to get on. The painting began!
|
|
|
Finished Restoration
Once the Jeep was dry, it was put back together. The new seals, carpet, air conditioning unit and sound system were installed. The finished Jeep is shown below!
|
|
|