Mini Pickup Restoration Project by pickupmad87

7 minute(s) of a 28 minute read

Mini Pickup Restoration Project

Compliments of pickupmad87 @ http://www.theminiforum.co.uk

2-27-2011

Right Guys and Gals this is my first proper posting so please bear with me as i am new to the forums malarkey!!

What we have here is one of two pickups we are planning to restore. this is the better one of the two believe it or not!!
here is couple of pics of how it started we had done a few repairs to it allready but forgot to take piccys!!
basicly this pickup had been trashed by some t**t who wanted to autograss it the decided he couldnt be botherd to finish it!!












Me and me old man were unsure as what to do to sort out the load bed and floorpans, so we got searchin through the forums and world wide web! we found that there are replacement panels available but we decided against this because the floor pressing come in two halfs. we priced up the complete load bed set up from mini machine and decided we need to go another route as funds arent endless!!!

things came to a halt for a while, untill we attended the brooklands mini show last year and got talking to a few people. one guy put us on to a bloke who had a complete floorpan and load bed that was cut out of a mini van. we ended up going for the van floor pan because it is pretty much exactly the same as the pickup floor bed minus the tailgate hinges.

here we have a few pics of the floor pan when we first got it.



the van chassis had had a few naff repairs over the past on the sills and rear valance so we stripped these off prior to shot blasting







when we got the van chassis back from the shot blasters this reavled a few more repairs that needed to be done.



the main repair that need to be done was to both wheel arches where the metal had got so thin there was splits up the arches so the thin metal was cut out and replaced.



once the repairs were done on the wheel arches it was time to have a look at repairing the inner sill.



the rotten material was cut out and a series of home made panels were made to fit.









after these repairs and some other small repairs were done, we concentrated our efforts on cutting the slots for the tailgate hinges and welding in the strenthing plates for the hinges.





after the hinge strenghteners were finalised we started to line up and weld the rear valances back into place.



once fully welded we set about replacing the outer sills. we didnt use the coplete cover sills we want it to look as original as possible so we replaced with the proper half sill. in our mind its better to use the originalhalf sill to let all the collected water in the load bed to drain out properley.

once this was completed both sides we set about making a repair to the door step on the passengers side and replaced the door step on the other side with part of an old repair panel we had used on my other project more on the other completed project in due course!!





Note to anyone that undergoes this sort of surgery work DO NOT fit the door steps to the floor pan as this causes alot of problems and headaches when you come to graft the sheel to th floor pan. oh well one will learn from ones mistakes!!!!

this was pretty much it for the repairs on the van chassis so after a clean up and blow out with the air hose we coated it in two coat of acid etch primer



after this was done the van base was put to one side in the work shop to make way for the pickup, a few more repairs were done to the pickup shell before the surgery was attempted!!!
i think thats enough for tonite as ive gotta be up early for work tomoz, hopefull i will get round to posting where we are upto at this current moment in time tommorow evening.
thanks for taking the time to read about our project any feedback would be appreciated!