Re-using Old Parts

Every day you're working on the restoration of an old vehicle, very frustrating decisions have to be made. One of the recurring themes of this rebuild has been how I've had to thread the line between just paying money to go faster (or buy better) versus taking the time to restore what's original to the truck. I think for a lot of rebuilds this is typically going to fall to one side or another: either because it's a commercial endeavour and replacing everything with new parts is desired for speed or certainty, or the restorer lacks resources and / or the build needs to be as original as possible.

Either way, if you have your decisions made beforehand on what you want to do, it makes it easy to soldier on ahead. Just keep what you have, or buy replacements!

For me, it always seems to come down to the little things. The small parts that can add up to a lot or conversely take a long time to refurbish.  To take one example, I had just assumed, previously, that I was going to need new wheel nuts. Almost half of mine had come off with the wheel studs on my early hubs because Land Rover decided that the best way to hold the threaded studs in was to peen the back of the threads.

Of course, with modern rattle guns and corrosion, these don't hold as well as we would like. The preferred solution to this problem is to buy new press-in wheel studs and just bore out the threads. I wasn't super excited about doing this since all I have is a hand drill. So I bought a bunch of wheel nuts thinking I'd buy new hubs. 

Well, when I bought the Salisbury, that problem mostly went away. I had new hubs with a complete set of studs (yay!) and their corresponding wheel nuts. So I decided that it would be a good idea to restore them along with the fasteners for the driven member. 

These are the wheel nuts and drive flange fasteners at the early stage of the process. I put on some gloves and began to run them through the wire wheel on the bench grinder. This worked pretty well to clean them up -- for the most part. 

After that, they needed some anti-rust treatment. I had picked up a small container of Evapo-Rust and thought I'd give it a try. A 24h soak indoors (it's quite cool outside and evaporust is sensitive to temperature) and they came out looking pretty fine, I think! The wheel nuts before, on the left, and after, on the middle & right. 

A quick dry and some brake cleaner later and they were ready for paint:

For paint I'm using a basic rattle can etch primer (Lordco, I think?) and I'm brush painting on the POR-15 chassis top coat. It seems to be a little thicker than typical auto store spray paint top coat and, on high wear parts like these, I'll take any extra protection I can get.