The bed was amazingly straight with only a couple of small areas of surface rust but where the rear bumper mounted onto the rear panels was in rough shape and as I didn’t want to run a rear bumper I cut everything out and and plated the whole thing up along with all the excess holes around the tailgate aperture.

I gave the rear a quick rattle can spray job and decided to fit some Porsche teledile wheels

and then swapped the plastic from bumper out for an early metal version

 

My mate at the time had a side business banding steel wheels so I had a set of g60 winter wheels banded and added drop plates to the rear axle and the front lowered to match so I needed to widen the rear arches by about an inch or so and rolled the front arches. A bit more thorough rattle can respray was done around the whole truck and this is where we got to.

 

God rado wheels looks so sick. Id love to have a set.

 

In the meantime I’d saved a nice green interior from an old boy in the next village over who was scrapping a mk1 Jetta and picked up another early dash so these were swapped in to tidy the interior up a little. At this point I’d been looking at pictures of sportrucks on the internet and decided this was the way I wanted to go. Luckily I have a friend who makes decals and stickers so I gave him the task of making and fitting the rather enormous decals While I sourced some other bits.

 

I'm really enjoying following along!!

The original decals were 3M reflective, so they lit up at night, when car headlights hit them, just like the 3M lettering on the tailgate. When I had mine repainted in the mid-90's, I had to have the tailgate letter made by a local sign shop, and they hand cut and fit each letter.

 

I didn’t know that as I’ve only ever seen them on a computer screen 😭 the only ones I’ve seen looked either grey or black so I just presumed they were mat. I went for matt black for mine (none reflective) 🤣

 

I managed to get hold of an early westy eggcrate front grille so I had to find some rhd square lights and after trawling eBay for a couple of days I got some the correct size from some 90s diahatsu sh*t box. Obviously it would be a nightmare trying to get a n early westy front panel and shipping it across the pond so out came the mig welder and with the grille for reference a little cutting and bending of metal then a few rattle cans we got to this point. I also managed to “refurb“ some bbs rs 3 piece wheels to fit the arches I’d prepared earlier.

 

Nicely played on the grille and headlights. Those are probably available in E-code for right hand drive, if you want something a little better. I have E-code for left hand drive on mine and they are much better then the originals. Nice to see another pickup come alive!

 

Jeep Cherokee was a big one for the headlights. Weird I thought the early Westy front used the same slam panel as the German cars.

 

The lower panel had little chunks cut out for the bottom of the round headlights and I think I had to move some of the slam panel supports to fit the headlight buckets but it was a while ago so I may be wrong

 

After a few months I managed to find an early westy slatted grille the only problem was I presume whoever had shipped or brought the grill back from the US thought it would be cheaper if it was cut in two 😭 I figured if I liked the slatted look better than the egg crate I could always plastic weld it back together so it was hastily stuck together to see what it looked like. I was also on the hunt for side markers but could only get red ones for some reason, there were the front orange ones out there but they were in pretty bad shape so I temporarily opted to use the red ones to make holes and fit them up.

 

They do look nice. They might go on the cabriolet when that eventually gets back on the road

 

How about some porsche cups? Need smaller tyres though

 

I’ve sold the Porsche cups now so I might out the g60 steels back on

 

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