The sling was made using a 35mm SHS bar and 2 heavy duty ratchet straps for the rear and another ratchet strap for the front. I glued on some rubber circles on the bar where it contacted the frame rail on the ute shell. Then I bought 3 lengths of high tensile lifting chain and d-shackles for the lifting points. Slowly, alternating between the three lift points I raised the ute up.

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Some pictures of the painting in process. The Raptor liner has to be sprayed with a special air gun called a Schutz gun or also known as a Body Deadener Gun. Do yourself a favor and DO NOT buy one off of eBay. My eBay gun for $19.95 lasted about 30 min. before it pooped itself. Then I was off in a panic to Autobarn to buy one for $50 which came in a 3 piece kit which worked very well. Another tip is to not set your air pressure too high. If the air pressure is too high it eats through the bottle of paint really quickly and you don't get as good of coverage.

The engine hoist was there to support the rear of the ute as I removed the sling straps.

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Also make sure that you mask up the sides of shell with newspaper and masking tape because the gun shoots the paint in a very wide spray and tends to get everywhere. Unfortunately the gun sprayed a few dots of the Raptor liner on my engine and some of the items I previously painted so I had to redo a few of them. Such things happen when you are in a rush.

The finished product! The paint comes in two versions - Black and tintable. Here I used the tintable version to get a vanilla color that matches the engine bay/cabin/tray. The paint takes a few days to fully harden but they say it is very tough and protect well. I hope they are right. Don't forget that in the States we have this stuff called Snow and when it gets on the roads they use SALT to melt it and that SALT likes to eat old cars made of metal. As we all know Datsuns are prone to rust.

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Looks good. Get little rubber grommets to plug all holes under the car. Maybe a wash diwn fairly regularly in winter too to get rid of salt

White will also show any fluid leaks or rust oxidization. Better than black.

Yea true. Why do they have so many holes in the frame rails and the tray and so forth? Is it for drainage?

The next part of the build was to tackle the rear wheel tubs. As you may have noticed the previous owner removed the standard rear wheel arches from the shell. My only guess was to run wider tires or larger diameter rims on the back.

Unfortunately for me this was a lot of work to try to resolve. I had a set of standard wheel arches and when I test fitted them to the ute shell I noticed that the hole for the cutout was a lot larger than the standard wheel arch. So since the whole was cut larger I wasn't able to use the standard wheel arches for installation.

Some quick thinking on our feet some family friends and I came up with the idea of using trailer wheel arches. We quickly sourced some smaller size ones from a Jet Ski dealership nearby. I picked them up for a great price as they were sitting on a shelf that hadn't been touched for years. On the way home we picked up some galvanised sheet and started to fabricate new wheel arches.

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I've never welded before and this build would have been a great opportunity. However, given the time constraints (10 day build) I had the help of a family friend who knew how to weld.

Here are some pictures of the fabricated wheel arches during the welding process. Given the temperature of the welds, in some spots the galv sheet started to flex. This slightly deformed the overall wheel arch and created a few gaps here and there where it met the shell. It would have been better to use a thicker sheet. I think the sheet we used was .8mm or 1mm not sure. The other problem was that the heated welds started to burn the Raptor Liner in some spots and without careful attention we could have easily burnt the shellt to the ground. Luckilly all was well. The welds were not the greatest but did the job for now.

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Lots and lots of metal grinding. My neighbors were not impressed. I could have easily spent 2 or 3 days grinding the welds to get them really nice and smooth but instead I only spent 1 day grinding both sides enough to get some etch primer on them. I used a wire wheel on the trailer arches and a hand grinder with a metal grinding disc on the actual welds. I also learned to wear long sleeves because molten metal bits are not fun when they land on your skin and arm hair.

Anyways here is the finished tubs for now. I would like to improve the quality of them in the future by either filling in smoother and more solid welds or by using a sealing compound to fill the gaps. Suggestions welcome.

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