Bob Faris' 1964 Factory Softtop FJ40

This truck came full circle....I got it years ago, fixed it up, sold it, 3 owners later it comes back to my shop for some new lovin'. Here are some pics Bob sent me before we got started. Forgive some of these pics, the camera I had sucked balls...the slightest movement made the pics out of focus. I photoshopped the hell out of some of them just to be viewable.

Here you can see a few of the pics while we had all of the rusted sections torn out and the beginning of the patching. We made this rear pan on a mandrel style bead roller. Cool Cruiser and Heritage want like 900 bucks and 8 weeks for them, we can do them for around 500 bucks. Anyways we de spotted all of the panels that were rusted and built the pieces such as the lower frame box, the rear floor pan and a tie in piece. Additionally we re skinned the rear channel and repaired the inner piece of the rear channel as well.

After we welded up all of the pieces and got everything plum and straight we sent the tub off to have it sand blasted. We had to weld up a bunch of small holes in the firewall and in the quarter panels of the truck as you can see in the pics. After it was cleaned of sand and grit we put 3 coats of epoxy primer on the tub and then prepped it for the poly liner. Below you can see the prep job required for lining a truck.

After prepping we lined the insider and underside of the truck and then primed it for matching up the body color.

While the body tub is on the dolly, we worked the frame components. After powdercoating every piece of metal we tap all the holes to make the installation process smooth. The axles of this truck were in descent shape but we went back through them and refreshed everything, then painted all the pieces with black and an accent silver. We installed discs brakes on the front and redid the rear brakes with upgraded components. Also the tcase was completely shot, just so happened that I had a pristine....and I mean pristine transfercase from a '68 on the shelf ready to go...

The next pics show some of the refinishing we do. We take all the pieces that cant be powdercoated or have moving parts which wont come apart and we sand and paint them to match the truck. Once the interior is painted it allows me to go ahead and start installing all the interior pieces, the wiring, the roll cage and such....later I will tape all of the this off to a hidden tape line and paint the outside of the truck as you can see in the bottom row. When that was finished we started installing the soft top.

The next series shows the soft top being completed with the tailgate down and the chains I built for it. You can also see some of the detail work we did on the running boards, we powdercoated the base and the trim piece and lined the top and then fit everything together for a non skid running board.

Bob posin' with his baby...Just for giggles, thought I would let you guys know, Bob turned down an offer of 28k for his truck. His kung fu is strong.