Finally our Landcruiser Troopy got blessed and blasted by AUTObLAST,
I hate rusts and to be rusted, I cannot imagine how people drive mint looking 4×4 off-road vehicles full of add ons and options or even on-roady fancy ones and when you crawl underneath you will be smashed by their underbody horrific rusted looking chassis and components!
From start of my overlander build I always wanted to do something to protect the Troopy from any future rust damages, off course another factor is this vehicle once going to remote places, access to the wash bays and carwashes and locations for washing the underbody properly, might be out of reach for months and months and nothing worse than leaving it dusty/muddy/wet and sandy for some months, then you think you are are driving the most reliable ever build Toyota vehicle?! that is just a joke, when your hard work getting slowly and slowly rusted under the harsh condition and out of your eyes, so I had to definitely protect it for the purpose of our remote overlanding.
The options for rustproofing your 4×4 vehicles seems available by different products and after searching on the net you will find lots of articles about this topic, from oiling to Anti rust agents applying then adhesive anti rust products spraying and rubberizing etc… you will find heaps of options after your initial searches, but to be honest which one could be worth for your future usage to trust and assure you your hard work will be protected well? Its really hard to decide in reality,
After all and reading heaps of articles and reviews, finally I decided to do a proper job despite of its high costs, but I needed to do something proper as fussy engineer and I found the only option here in NZ is a company named Autoblast running by David Kirkham in Auckland, he seems very well experienced in this topic and he truly explained very well details of the job, once I called him for first questions he answered all questions by patient and he is into it, still had my doubt if the entire job would damage anything under the Troopy and could cause any future mechanical issues or not? but he assured me there is no any such damage after if the job done properly, as they know how to handle it and they will cover critical areas before start to do anything.
Basically Autoblast is one stop company for the job, from Sandblasting and Zinc Galvanizing then final coatings, they do all stage by stage, David is very responsive and patient which I liked dealing with him and also he will provide a loan car for his clients and running his business very tidy and convenient for his clients, in one word do not deal with businesses who they don’t care about your questions or clients and they leave you on the cloud, but I totally suggest David for this important job,
The stages for entire job varies based on the condition of the components, but in a quick explain the complete package is listed here:
1) Sand blasting, to remove all current available surface rust if existed any.
2) Galvanizing the bare metal, is by coating the bare metal by a layer of hot Zinc over the main parts to act as sacrificial layer will protect the main base metal parts, this is almost is same as the hot dip galivanting but just by specific hot gun metal spray as the vehicle is fully assembled is a good way to get almost same affect of the hot dip zinc pools.
3) Durepox 2K coating, prime and clear top coat, which is chemical epoxy adhesive and one of the top notch protector invented material to act against wet and harsh environment mainly in the yatch industry for its high end result, which thankfully David using it for the vehicle rustproofing too,
you can read more about this adhesive by below link too:
Durepox Epox (Resene link)
4)Cavity waxing,
To even protect all your framing and hidden cavities or channels by injecting antirust/rust killing agents into the out of sight areas.
As you see in above photo Troopy got some surface rust signs, but in overall not bad at all, its not mint brand new look but this surface rusts easy to remove and I decided to get the full blessing, so I did the sand blasting the whole under body for any tiny amount of surface to be fully removed first, then did the full hot Zinc coating which you can see this stage by two below videos, also following here there are some images of the final result after applying the final layer of Durapex coating.
Still it is very early to tell you how this rustproofing system will perform, but after some years and off the beaten track discovering dust and mud and river passing, durability of this system will be more accurate to judge it in the detail, but overall as an engineer who studied metallurgy back in the days and always hated the rusts, I can tell myself now you can sleep well as the annoying rust now after this job could not easy annoy you as a worry 😉
