Well, after finding a nice rot spot on my FJ40, I finallly had an excuse to go out and buy this:

 

This was why I bought it:

 

New piece of sheet metal put in, welded in place. It was fun to weld, but am glad it wasn't anything I had to trust my life to. A welding course will be in my future....

 

A bit of a work with an angle grinder, a bit of bondo to smooth things out a little:

 

Primered then covered with Duplicolor bed liner, which I sprayed the whole interior with, minus the dash and footwells...

 

The rest of my FJ40 after spraying:

 

Nice work. Turned out clean.

 

turned out great, David! good job with the newbie welding. im sure your FJ and 4R will be seeing many new things coming from that welder (lucky you!)

 

Looks good David! You're putting a lot of work into your new rig and it shows!

 

David, Nice! I was wondering what you were talking about on the other thread. As you know I'm in a hobbyist welding course, I can say enough about it. I'm sure one of the local community colleges around there offers courses. Relatively inexpensive to boot, plus lots of cool toys!
A few Questions:

Are you using Stargon (75%Argon/25%CO2) or strait-up Argon?

If you don't mind (in some circles its kind of rude), how much did you pick up the FJ for?

Later

 

i hate you david!!!!! the liner looks awsome though!!!! how grippey is the liner? the kind i bought for my cargo box wasn't really all that grippy. looking for something better for cargo box 2.0 this summer.

 

Looks good, but please don't weld any suspension parts with that thing.

You got the gas, that's a huge plus...........................

 

David i have a bumper fabbing job for you, you ready

 

Yea, it's really easy once you get the hang of it. Just remember to remove paint before welling and it makes life a lot easyer.

 

A welder that small typically doesn't get great penetration on anything approaching the 3/16"-1/4" range, so you might want a bigger welder if the bumper is going to be heavy duty. Definitely get something bigger if you are going to weld on somethine where "your life might depend on it"

FJ is looking good! Makes me want one!

 

Thanks for the kudos guys. I was tempted to pick up something beefier, but the house I'm renting at the moment has a pretty scary electrical system, 90% of the house still has cloth covered wires! So...I didn't feel safe using anything other than standard voltage. It'll be good enough for sheet metal, light duty stuff, that sort of thing, anything heavy duty I'll rely on someone else for sure.

Rugby, I was using argon/CO2. I haven't used gas and flux core side by side yet to see how much difference there is, but "heard" that for sheet metal gas is a little easier to control. I picked up the FJ40 for 3 grand from a fellow yotatech member, and don't regret it for a second. I've never taken on such a big project before, I'm learning how to do alot of things for the first time. Modding the 4runner was fun, but it was alot of bolt-on stuff. I'll likely be doing alot more fab work on this project for sure....

Kevin, its pretty grippy. They've got spray cans for 8 bucks, you don't get quite as much texture as you do when you spray with a compressor, the can gives you a much smoother finish, less grip.