I know I bang on about not doing any detailing during winter, and I don’t normally, however my Jeep was in need of a service and a little of TLC after I had kindly ‘hired’ it out for the summer to a visiting American in my work....Let’s just say she never looked after it very well...
So, my to do list for my battered old beast was as follows:
Full service
New front brake pads
Re-paint crash damage areas (x4)
Fix blown bulbs
Repair and restore front leather seats
Re-paint wheels
Remove rust and paint brake callipers
Clean interior after failed battery/smashed window incident
Then after all that, give her a cleanup.....
Not much to do then....
OK, wheels and callipers first:
Wheels before:
Showing some of the damage I wanted to get rid of:
And the ironX ‘bleeding’ from one of the wheels:
After they were clean and dry, I started to sand the wheels with wet and dry paper, starting with the lowest (roughest) grade, and working my way up...IIRC, I started on 240 grit and finished on 1500 for these. Time was a bit rushed, so didn’t get the wheels 100%, I will show you later why this is important....
The wheels were then taped up, placed in my ‘paint studio’
and given a few coats of primer:
I left about 30 minutes in between coats, then used my lamps to help cure the paint before moving onto the paint stage....I went for something different here, fancying a change, I went with Gold! Ford Solar Gold to be exact:
You can see in the above photo, an area at the top of the wheel, which I did not sand completely...any imperfections at the sanding stage still show up in the paint stage – be warned and take your time with the preparation!
After a few coats of this, using the same process as above, they were given the last coats of clear coat and left to dry off, which left these to stick back on the Jeep:
Overall, I am quite happy with the results...
While that was going on, I was busy with the service, starting the seats and doing the brakes and callipers....here is the driver’s side before;
I used my dremmel style Silverline tool with the ‘stone’ attachments to sand/grind off the worst of the rust, again I was not chasing perfection here, but I think you could easily spend a day on each side to achieve this....
Once I was happy with the finish, out came my paintbrush and hammeright smooth paint, and a few coats later, I had this:
Again, good enough for the Jeep, and I am happy enough with the result.
Now, we move onto the front seats, which after nearly 150k miles and 14 years of work, were starting to show their age...the girl I gave the Jeep to, was short, fat and loved wearing jeans, which didn’t help the drivers seat
...
This is what I had, and some of the areas I was trying to fix and to restore: