MONSTA!!!

Kassie and I successfully applied our Monstaliner kit to the interior floors and surfaces of Alice recently. It went very well, and the results are a rugged, non-slip, rust preventative floor for our little Jeep. Here's the story in Pictures:

TEARDOWN:

 

PREP - PRIMER

ROLLING ON THE MONSTA!

Looks great, washes out easy, super durable, and NO RUST!!!

Thanks to Magnet Paints and Monstaliner for such a great product!

Stay tuned!!! Alice is getting Painted!!!! Updates coming soon!!

Having A Blast!

What's going down in the hood?
Old nasty burnt up paint, that's what!

 Our original hood was bent up beyond repair. So I contacted Pat, the Jeep guy in Long Beach, and he had a hood off of a Jeep that had caught fire. The metal was pretty much straight, but the multiple layers of paint were scorched and cracking. The whole thing needed to be completely stripped and fresh primer laid down before we could paint it. If not, the new paint would eventually crack and flake off. A lot of work,  but for $75, how could I pass it up?

We started with Kassie and I removing the hinge bolts and then lifting and carrying the hood to our home-made sand blasting booth.

Once we got the hood off, we found a nice little surprise.. RUST! Under the hinges, where the original owner of the hood had forgot to primer after the paint burnt off, was rusty.

Here you can clearly see the cracked paint we had to strip completely off.

I borrowed the portable sand blaster from my work, bought some play sand, and was ready to blast away at the old paint.... silly me.The sand I had bought was Play Sand and much too "wet" to use in a sand blaster. It was late, so I decided to go back to Home Depot in the morning to get "dry" sand.

Saturday, I made it to Home Depot, got 100lbs of med grit construction sand, filled the sand blaster, fired up my compressor and we were off to the races!

It wasn't as easy as you would think.

 

Left: Here's a picture of the rust that had formed under the hood hinge on the replacement hood.

Kassie and I took turns blasting away at the paint. On a 90 degree day, with mask and goggles, it was hot, sweaty, sandy, dirty work. Eventually, we got all the paint of the top and underside of the hood.

 <= Me!
(my best side)

Kassie =>

After all is said and done, we probably spent enough on sand and primer to have paid for a body shop to do the same thing. But where's the fun in that? Here's the Before and After Pics:

The Finished Product!

 Straight, Clean, and ready to paint. Mounted it back onto Alice. Looks great IMO!

More to come.....

 Where the Rubber
                Meets the Road

Finally got my act together enough to find a used set of Jeep Ravine Rims (Thanks to a nice CHP officer I met through www.JeepForum.com) and set about finding the best possible value on tires.

The local 4x4 Shops have awesome tires, but they are really designed and priced for a real off-roading enthusiast. Looked at used tires, but this Jeep is for my daughter, so used was eliminated as an option very quickly. I found a great deal on a set of Goodyear Wrangler Radial All Terrain tires at my local Wal Mart. An hour or so later, and Alice was back on the road.

Still need to work on the body to get Alice ready for paint, but I did order a Monstaliner kit from Magnet Paints. As soon as the kit comes in, we are seting out to Monstaliner the interior floor surfaces.

I'll post a blog with pics after we complete the Monsta install.

Thanks for reading!

Almost Done....

Need Tires, Shocks, and cosmetics..

(part 5 of the series)

Catching Up...

Where we are and where we are going.

It's been quite a while since my last post. The project took on a new perspective and slowed to a crawl as the funding dried up. Yes, the project is "over budget" but in all honesty, we all knew this was going to happen, and it's not about the money..really. 

Since last I posted, we've experienced the ultimate squeaky belt, rain without a top, cold of winter without a top or heater, grinding brakes, unexplainable high engine temps, a leaky transmission, what we call the Turn Signal Incident, and a cracked windshield. Ya, I know, sounds bad.. I keep thinking Money Pit as well, but hey, it's fun too. The good news is that Kassie has been an absolute stud and driven the jeep as-is for the entire time now. She loves Alice (the Jeeps name) and has vowed never to sell her.

In the next few blog posts, I'll detail what I can here to get you all updated to where we are now. Stay Tuned! 

Them's the Breaks

The Jeep needed brakes desperately. Kassie, her main man Kyle, and I set about to install new rotors and Pads. Kassie has done the breaks on her moms van (with my supervision) before, and was now going to teach Kyle how to install brakes (again, with my supervision).

To the left you can see the badly scored and rusted out rotor on the driver's side front.  The pads were down to the metal and had torn up the rotors so bad they needed replacing. 

See all that rust on the rotor face? It took a lot of elbow grease to remove the rims after all that rust had formed. We got them off, but they were the hardest rims I've ever tried to take off.

 

We cleaned off all the dirt and spiderwebs, inspected the lines, caliper, and slides. Removed the old rotors and replaced them with brand new ones. 


To the right, you can see just how bad the old rotors were - pretty sad. 


The new rotors were all shiny and full if awesome. Only problem was, they looked out of place on the jeep. Too new when compared to the pitted, dirty suspension components around them. 


Below is the new rotor on the old jeep. 

Kyle did most of the work, directed by Kassie who consulted with me. So in that respect, we are a lot like the American Auto Industry... 3 people for a 1 man project. 

Once we had the new rotors installed, we greased the slides, compressed the calipers, and prepared to install the pads.

Side Note: 

We use a product called Zep SuperPenn, it's a penetrating oil used to loosen rusted bolts. Without this can of Zep, nothing on this Jeep would have ever come apart. We've come to refer to the aerosol can of Zep SuperPenn as simply "Zep Juice".

If you look closely, you can see the blue can in the picture of Kyle to the right. 

Zep SuperPenn is the MVP of this project! 

Here's a shot of the old, worn pads. They were thin as thin can be. If you look closely, you can see that they were worn down to the rivets holding the pad material on. OUCH! 

Out with the old and in with the new.  Thanks to our friends at Autozone, these thick beauties will help our Jeep stop when it should.

I'm amazed it stopped at all before.  

Pleased to announce that the brakes work great! 

No Squeaks or grinding noises - 

Great Job Kyle and Kassie!!! More to come!

Like, Share, Tweet, whatever! Thanks for reading. Stay Tuned for the next update.