I would of never thought that I would buy an fj40, I always had plans of maybe some day getting myself a little 80's pickup. After golf one day I came upon a 1976 land cruiser parked in a field with a for sale sign in the window, I thought it was the coolest thing I ever did see. I hopped out of my 4Runner to check it out and take pictures, my wife could tell how awesome I thought it was. Couple days later I gave him a call and asked how much he is asking, the price scared me away a bit but I still knew I had to have it, i felt like this was my only chance to ever own one of these. A week later I talked to the owner again and he said he must of had close to 40 phone calls, that's when I withdrawn the money from my account and asked to take a second look. The fact that it actually ran and drove was just a bonus to me. The Now previous owner was so upset to sign the papers over, but he had too due to a farm full of vehicles and his wife over his shoulder. Long storey long, I absolutely love this thing and love tinkering with it and poking at the rust and envisioning what some day it can become!

Soooo, thinking that changing differential fluids would be easy... I was wrong! After laying on the ground messing around with the diff fill plug for an hour I finally gave up and left it for the next day. The FJ beat me this time, I was getting very frustrated and mad but I had to stop and tell myself " this is your hobby that you very much enjoy, so don't get pissed" so the next day I got back at it, a little more relaxed. And vwolah! 10 minutes later I got it free. Front one came off a lot easier. Next I'll be tackling transmission and transfer case.

I finished off the last of the fluid changes. Bashed my hand pretty good getting transfer case filler bolt loose. After a little reading on the forums I found someone recommended a 5 gallon pale and hand pump to fill these tricky spots, worked out really nice actually.

Gave the interior a good cleaning, scrapped off the layer dirt and garbage it collected over all the years. There was a very strong odour of gas inside the cab and I found out that the gas tank had rust holes right through it.

The Land Cruiser is back up and running! New gas tank is in, but come winter time I'll be stripping it apart again and putting some new steel in for the driver side floor. A few good size holes.

Well I tried out the 4x4 for the first time, I was overly amazed with how well it performed. Not a click or a clunk, she performed just as well as my 2015 4Runner!

My first time seeing another FJ40 in my city, I stopped and had to take pictures. Luckily his dad pulled up and told me all about it, he is in college and might take some time to restore it.

So I got that itch that everyone was talking about, my plan now is to pull the motor out, fix the drivers floor, replace the rear sill, and if I have time this winter I would also like to some-what fix or patch the rear wheel wells. I will be taking the motor to my uncle to get rebuilt. Here are some photos of the tear down.

It's like the movie "big daddy" when he uses the news paper to clean up the spilt milk haha! I do need absorb-all in my garage though.

I never searched how others took their transmission and transfer case out, so I figured this should work. And it did alright. Next time I'll probably try and take out with the motor and all intact.

First time pulling a motor, and it felt good!! I've learnt so much about this 40 already.

And motor sitting at the shop awaiting some much needed love!

Trying to organize as good as I can while taking this whole truck apart. All of the bolts go into a bag and then labeled.

Bought this shelf just for holding everything thats coming off of the 40, maybe I could use two of these.

RUST RUST RUST, rust everywhere! My father and I are currently cutting the rust out and trying to come up with a plan. We have a 4x8 piece of 18 gauge steel, a sheer to cut the steel. And I guess we will attempt to fabricate ourselves. There will be pieces that we can't do ourselves, like the rear sill, or maybe even the rear fender brackets.

After making calls all over Saskatchewan I could not find a single thing for the 2f, I happened to call 4wheelauto.com from Edmonton, and after searching for a week or two Dan found me everything I needed. He had to source all this stuff from 4 corners of the world. For the most part it's all original Toyota parts, none of that no name stuff.

The 40 is coming along great! I started out borrowing a flux-core mig welder and since then I have upgraded to a gas mig welder. I am so much happier using gas now. My welds started out terrible, but after being on my 5th panel now my welds are getting much better. I am enjoying it very much but the grinder is my best friend though.

After every piece I weld in, I get more and more excited. It's a great feeling of accomplishment especially since this is my first time welding on a project like this. I definitely could not afford to pay someone to do this, so this was my only resort. Oh and I never actually planned on getting this deep into it lol, you start tearing it apart and all of a sudden you have a full restoration on your hands.

Here's the first exterior piece I did with the flux-core welder, if you look closely at the second picture you can see how terrible my welding was.

Here is the new hobart welder! ready to start working!

Engine is all rebuilt and ready to go! Now to hurry my ass up and get all the rust under control. I really want to have her running this summer. The push is on.

So I figured I might as well replace the clutch while it's all ripped apart, the clutch that was in it could have been 40 years old. And the rear sill ready to put in.

I gave the transmission and transfercase a good ole pressure wash and steam clean, it came out looking pretty clean. Will give the transmission a couple coats of paint before she goes back in. Iv decided not to rebuild the tranny and transfer case since there is no shaft play and operated perfectly fine before pulling. I need something to do in the next few years anyways .📷 I feel like this will be my new hobby every winter for the next how ever many years .

So here is that box piece right before the rear bed, she was rusted right out.

So instead of making a box, I made 4 separate pieces to replicate the box. It looks like from factory they achieved this with only making two cuts.

To get the bends that I'm looking for, I just put these flat pieces into this wooden vice. I then use steel angle iron to give it a good surface to clamp to, then give the steel a 90 degree angle with a rubber mallet!

This is my first time getting stuff powder coated, and holy s#*!. It's beautiful haha. Forty years old and looks brand new! The bell housing, skid plate, battery mount, radiator shroud. I'll definitely powder coat what ever I can for now on.

The next night I got this far....

Until I ran out of .024 wire, and that's when I remembered I have some .030 I bought before purchasing the welder.....but what really stopped me was the fact that the bigger wire does not fit through the copper tip now! Well I'll be prepared that doesn't happen again! It really sucks when you have all the momentum going and then something this simple stops all the work.

Here's my first attempt at doing rosette plug welds. I figured it was a good place to try it out. I found you had to hold the weld a little bit longer to penetrate to the steel underneath.

I am damn near done this box piece, just have to clean up a couple welds. Then mate the fender to the box with another piece of steel.

All done! It came out pretty good actually. Feels really solid.

This week I'll be taking seats in to be reupholstered! I have no clue how much this will cost, but it definitely needs to be done.

Here's that same box piece but the driver side, as you can see I attempted at repairing it when I had that flux-core welder and less experience. I cut the seam out where it all connects, and just like all the rest of the seams on this 40 it was very swollen with rust.

Cut out the rusty swollen seam.

Here's my new piece, the holes are for bolting down the drivers seat. Some how I got the bolt holes perfectly where they needed to be.

Ground down my ugly welds and she's good to go!

It's like Christmas opening these nicely wrapped packages lol anyways!! New radiator, water pump, hose kit, thermostat, weather stripping for all the doors, and a engine repair manual.

These interior body mounts are really bad!

This section was tacked down to the bottom piece and was super fun to get out!

The replacement pieces ready to get tacked in.

First piece tacked in.

All welded in and ground down the welds. Good enough for me!

Next up the fender wells! they are in terrible shape. I will patch what I can, but I may need to fab a whole top skin. We shall see! There used to be fender braces under these fenders at all four corners and they supported the roll bars that were inside the cab. They all rusted out in the exact spots and the exact same amount of rust.

A nice big easy flat piece! A lot of welding though.

Here is the rear of the fender but it needs an even bigger piece of steel.

I do not want to bore you guys, so I will just tell you I did the exact same thing as this on the passenger side fender.

Here's some pics of a little adventure I did before tearing it apart. I was by myself and ended up getting hung up by these big ruts. Luckily I go nowhere without my trusty personal recovery gear(maxtraxx, hi-lift jack, shovel, and axe) I ended up using all of it except the axe.

I had to yank this tree out of the way. This little trip to the valley was the last time I took her four wheeling, she really started to smoke on the way home. That's when I really realized she needed some loving.

Thanks to davework at overland metric for this 1000 piece bolt kit! I definitely could of pieced together this kit myself at work but instead of needing 10 different wrenches it would be nice to only need 3 to 5.

Also just got this rebuild kit for the emergency drum brake, pads were shot and full of rust inside. Will hopefully powder coat the drum too.

I some how got lucky enough to have the afternoon off! Well my dad and I got right into her, after humming and hawing for a few months trying to get some kind of plan for the rear sill. We felt confident Enough to take a stab at it. We will be replacing the side channels that connect to the sill also.

We spent a lot of time trying to align this sill good as we could. Finally we were pleased, and I made six tacks for now to hold it in place. I can weld the rest of it on my own time.

Plug welds all filled and ground down.

Had a fellow Land Cruiser enthusiast come and deliver these quarter panels! It's nice to see what a complete 40 looks like. This diesel sure has a nice sound to her, I like it. Thanks for saving me lots of time @Varty Yo

The replacement starter I will be using is from a 1985 FJ60. They have a lower gear ratio than the original starter so more torque to fire it up.

I did get back the last batch of powder coated stuff though! That's exciting for me. I honestly just powder coated everything lol seat rails, brackets, mounts, centre console, front heater, rad mount, fan shroud, bell housing, motor mounts, heat shield that no one would ever see.

Since trollhole is taking quite some time to get his stock in, I pulled the trigger on this setup. The 40 ran just fine but might as well upgrade.

This is the retro coolant heater thats been in this truck for who knows how long. I will replace it with something new in case I do drive this truck in winter.

After forty some years the seats look like new again! the grey is a little off from the original color but thats not a big deal.

I'm back at it!! Between work, baseball, and building a overland camping trailer, I had no time to work on the 40. Baseball is now done, and work is slowing down. Here is some progress. Cut the top skin off of the fender and then also cut the quarter panel where I needed it to be for the new panel.

I was quick to just tack in the new quarter panel, it did sit in there pretty nice after the first couple tries.

The driver side quarter panel fit in very well actually, especially for being my first time ever doing a panel this size.

Now onto the top skins of the fenders. Trace the rusty ones out onto my eight foot sheet of steel.

I did plug welds from quarter panel to top of fender. They worked out alright. Didn't really tighten to the quarter as nice as I thought. But seam sealer should do the trick.

Now the passenger side! I'm already not as satisfied, the driver side just had a better fit. I guess I'll see once I grind the welds down. The metal is also thinner up top so it burns through super easy.