I'm not really sure where to begin but here goes....

First a little back story. I bought my disco from a friend for $2500 about 10 years ago, when I was in my mid 20s. It had about 200k on the dash and was far from perfect but I drove it for a while none the less and loved it. I always wanted to restore the truck not to new per se but into a good working order and somewhat reliable. Fishing is my first passion and I'm fortunate enough to have lived out an anglers dream guiding and fishing all over the world so the disco took a back seat. I stuffed it in a barn in 2014 and it's been there ever since.

Fast forward 8 years and I'm finally at a point in my life where I'm no longer traveling 10 months out of the year and I'm in the financial position to begin a 10 year dream in the making. Unfortunately over the years of sitting mold and mildew have set in. So this is turning out to be a fairly large undertaking but I'm just going to send it and we'll see where the road leads.

Because of the current state of the interior I'm starting there. So far I have pulled the headliner, rear interior panels, foam mat, and carpet. I'm working from the rear forward as I had to replace the rear door hinges so it seemed like a good place to start. The plan is to pull the entire interior and clean everything really well. There is some light surface rust so I'm going to take a wire wheel to it before coating the interior with Rust Bullet and reinstalling new sound deadening material. That's about as far as I've made it. I'm just going to address things as I have to I think I may have to replace a few door cards but time will tell. I'm also thinking of respraying the interior paneling and trim pieces if anyone knows of a good product for that please let me know. Also if anyone has removed the rear foam/rubber mat what did you replace it with?

I'm going to try and be more diligent about recording my process/progress for everyone. I'm going to get some photos of the current state of the interior it isn't terrible but it also isn't usable and far from being roached out.

I also tried posting photos but I kept getting a message "Images will insert in-line, all other file types will attach to your post" and couldn't continue further as the upload button was greyed out.

 

Great, we’ll look forward to seeing your progress. As you know, it will be worthwhile.

 

Yeah it's definitely been a long time coming. I'm going to possibly post some videos of the journey but we'll see. I'm going to be grinding on it over the next week then I've got to go work for a few weeks but my goal is to have the interior put back in by the time I leave or at least close.

Today was quite the adventure. I'm erasing all expectation and just putting one foot in front of the other with this and we'll see where it takes me. I put in a long day today and found some stuff I didn't want to. We had a pretty hard rain yesterday so I kept checking in the truck for leaks. I found that the upper passenger side of the wind shield was leaking pretty bad and apparently it's been doing it for quite some time. I pulled the remaining rear interior panels this morning, the center console and the seats. The front passenger side carpet was soaked, I pulled the matt and there was rust every where. It was never really apparent before as the original under coating is still in relatively good shape. Luckily with the exception of one spot about the size of a quarter the floor is still in relatively good shape. I wish I could say the same about the drivers side. I have no idea where the water came from. The carpet and matt were totally dry today, so I'm not really sure what's going on. Regardless it has to be fixed to I spent the afternoon cutting the floor out and grinding, in preparation to weld in new sheet metal. I was able to able to knock a small hole into the fender area so I'm pulling that in the morning to see the extent of that.

 

Oh shoot, that’s too bad. At least it seems to be quite contained to one area.

 

I made quite a bit of progress today. It took a few hours but I got the dash out it wasn't too terribly bad but wasn't all that enjoyable either. I removed the driver side tire and pulled the fender to find the extent of the rust and it wasn't that bad, should be an easy patch. I cleaned everything in preparation to weld in the new sheet metal and apply the POR-15 tomorrow and depending on how it dries I may start applying the sound deadening also. Also does anyone know off hand what this black box is? it looks like and amp for something possibly. The water coming in from the windshield made it rust a bit.

 

I've made quite a bit of progress the floor and wall have been repaired. I'm waiting on some seam sealer now. I'm not going to post any pictures until I get the seam sealer in as I'm terrible at welding and I don't want to embarrass myself. I will post some pictures tomorrow as I attend to some one the small areas and get the interior cleaned and ready to go back in. Also could a mod move this over to the build thread?