So last Thursday a bunch of buddies came by, we rolled the truck over to the tent, lifted the body off and got it set up.

The frame is back in the garage for now. Im stealing some brackets off it, plus all the body mount hardware, and then chopping it up for scrap.

​So yesterday morning after I got home from work I suited up, grabbed the wire wheel & the sand blaster and went at it!

​...so that's where she sits as of now. Before you ask, im not sand blasting the entire tub, only the underside. I have no intention on driving this thing in the road salt, but i dont want to get it all done and have the floorpan start rusting away a year or two later. The fenders & interior are clean with good paint on them, so theyre just going to get prepped and painted later on. The underside is going to get sprayed as soon as im done down there, so I can get it on my frame and get it back in the garage.

Progress on this thing is pretty slow as currently Im only working on it a couple days a week. Today im painting in the house, but hopefully tomorrow I can get back out there and do some more blasting!

​Fast forward to about two weeks ago.

Doors are now off

​And I stripped and removed the front clip:

There is no real rot on the under-side of the tub, but there is rust at all the seams in the sheetmetal. So after going back and forth I said screw it and set up the tent in the stones

The last of the interior & dash came out

​Rust hole up near parking brake pedal:

​...and a little bit of rust back near the tailgate:

​...That's actually the worst of it! The rear fenders have some rot, but it doesn't matter since I have to cut the fenders to clear the 42s anyway. That will all come way later on.


This part is concerning though:

The previous owner welded a piece of box tubing into the body out back instead of using body lift pucks, so im gonna have to get this cut out and see whats going on behind it. Don't want the body lift, the truck is tall enough as it is.

I also got the sound deadener stripped off the floor as well:

That was back in May, it pretty much just sat in the stones at my house until closer to the 4th of July, when a buddy came over to help me get this project started.


We scrubbed the hell out of the hard top (it still needs a lot more work) and then yanked it off and set it on the trailer.  Then gave this thing its first bath in 10+years!

​Pulled the tailgate off; the shell is shot but the hardware is all in great shape. Started yanking out the interior and found an old mouse-house behind the real panel, along with the former tenant

We pretty much gutted the whole interior except for the dash, and then then called it quits for the day.
​
So much clean sheetmetal!

​​...and stuffed into the garage until the next time I could get around to working on it:

​So after years of wheeling and not caring, ive pretty well thrashed the body on my bronco.

​The whole cab is twisted so the full doors don't come even close to closing so we have to use the half doors any time we take the truck out, and then tarp it up so it doesn't get wet inside n the rain/snow.
So after going back and forth, we decided to go back to a bronco body on this thing. The cab/bed was cool and all, but it dosent really have much room for carrying much gear, and not being able to drive it on the road sucks. So I stared looking for a bronco project. I wanted to stay true to the trucks roots (I have owned it 16 years afterall) which meant the body has to be an 87-91. I wanted to find something clean because im not a sheetmetal guy, and the condition of the drivetrain was completely irrelevant because im just going to drop the body on my frame when im done.

So I snooped around CL for quite some time. Seen trucks come and go, but nothing really jumped out at me. Then one day I spotted a lift 4-door bronco on CL up in the Poconos. Only two pics of the exterior, but it looked like a decent buy for the price, so I made the trip. On an impulse i decided to go up there and see if it would be a decent beater to cruise around in. Unfortunately it was a bit rough around the edges, more-so than I would've liked for a street cruiser so I decded to pass on it. But while BSing with the guy, he told me about this bronco he had planned to restore, but it never really happened. So we go over to take a look at it, and its perfect. its a '90 in decent shape with no motor or trans. The perfect donor vehicle! So we struck up a deal, and I brought it home :thumbup


So here she is, in all her glory.

​It was a parked in stones under a tree for 10 years, so while being absolutely covered in moss, appeared to be in decent shape!

He had put a body lift in it (homemade, about 2"), and he built his own shackle flip for the rear with some extra leafs stuffed in there for some more lift. And there it sat, never got around to lifting the front, or doing anything else to it.

​This isnt really the beginning, this is arguably Phase Four.  Five?  I guess it depends on how you look at it.
i could consider Phase One from bone stock to when i had the 36" iroks, but Phase Two is definitely when i did the one-tons and 42s.  Phase Three has to be when i put the pickup cab on.  But does that make Phase Four the big block?  or is that an extension of Phase Three?  Like Phase Three, Part 2 or something.  It wasnt exactly planned, so im gonna go with that.  So that means we're entering Phase Four.