I started on fixing a few things up on the old girl today. As you’d all know, sound insulation in a Defender is pretty much non-existant. So I went down to Supercheap and brought some of this stuff:
This is what the rear guards looked like before I started:
And this is what it looked like after a coat:
The idea behind it is to reduce some of the road noise that comes through. I’ve only done the rear guards so far, but I’ll be continuing it on to the front guards, as well as underneath the seats etc. Hopefully it’ll make a difference.
The side effects are that black actually looks better underneath there, and hopefully with this seal in place it ‘may’ help with things like rust etc caused by beach work. That ones to be seen in the future though. It also may reduce the noise of the muddies throwing rocks up onto the panels – might dampen the noise and protect the panels a bit – hopefully!
The other ‘job’ I’ve gotten onto is fixing up the old steel rims. Surface rust and a few dents etc have really started to creep in over the last year or so.
So basically I took the air out of the tyres and used the bead breaker to make life easier. Once this was done I tidied up the rims to remove the rust and straighten them out. I used the ‘killrust’ paint as it is a primer and top coat in one can – and the advantage is that it is ‘killrust’ 😉
Anyway, I got two of the rims done today – 4 more to go though! This is what it looked like after I used the Karcher on it:
From there I used the grinder and tidied it up. After this I used some tape and newspaper to protect the tyre. I didn’t remove the tyre as it was more of a risk than anything else – eg damaging the bead!
BTW – I marked were the ‘weights’ went with a white marker pen and then removed them out of the way.
Getting painted:
End result:
Now to finish of the rest of them 😕
And of course – any job can not be done without some sort of motivation:
Cheers
Chris