Toyota RAV4 GX "Jack" - Scrapped 20th August 2021 // Final Video To End 2021

[juular]

2 minutes ago, St.Jude said:

 

It's mental, as the underside of my 1998 Corolla is in great shape. All of it had some sort of rubber coating, and the only rusting bits it has are to do with bolts and other things that aren't to do with the chassis. I'm really surprised that the 2005 RAV4 you showed there was more rotten than this! I won't ask to swap 😂.

Anyway, just as well I need a fuel filler neck, as they come as a unit complete with the filler neck and vapour return pipe. It's the last thing to do before the fuel tank gets dropped, I have the jubilee clip of the filler neck loosened, and as I went to do the vapour pipe...

It broke in half. I'm glad I wasn't going mad thinking it was normal to smell petrol when the tank was filled to the top! 

Mine was a Celica but it went in similar places by the looks of it. My filler neck also broke into pieces as I removed it, but it took a chunk of the body away the size of an A4 sheet as it came out.  That was going to be a very tricky place to fabricate and weld a new piece on and one of the main motivators for weighing in the car.

It looks like your car is significantly better than mine was and it looks like it actually has some good underbody protection.

It does seem weird that Toyota suspension parts seem particularly susceptible to rust. At least those are easily replaceable and parts are cheap.

I'd recommend jetwashing the underside, it's a good way of testing the integrity of what's there and highlighting the bits that will need work. I found the Celica had bits that looked ok until prodded and what looked like underseal was actually bits of caked on mud hiding a hole!

[warch]

Thanks juular, yes this and the Volvo thread are two of my favourites on here.

 

[artdjones]

I think with Toyota's it partly depends where they're made. If in Japan, where most cars are scrapped at 6 to 8 years old because of their extremely expensive roadworthiness test ,probably rustproofing isn't such a priority. If made in Europe, where cars are expected to last 15 years if reasonably looked after they are much better. I've never seen a rusty E12 Corolla, and they've been out for nearly 20 years.

[St.Jude]

4 hours ago, warch said:

Thanks juular, yes this and the Volvo thread are two of my favourites on here.

 

Aww 🙂 you know what today has been a genuinely shit day, and for once nothing to do with the car, and this has actually made me smile! I'm glad my pain is your pleasure 😂

4 hours ago, artdjones said:

I think with Toyota's it partly depends where they're made. If in Japan, where most cars are scrapped at 6 to 8 years old because of their extremely expensive roadworthiness test ,probably rustproofing isn't such a priority. If made in Europe, where cars are expected to last 15 years if reasonably looked after they are much better. I've never seen a rusty E12 Corolla, and they've been out for nearly 20 years.

This RAV4 and my Corolla were both Japan built cars. The Corolla after a year went to the UK, but the one I have is definitely Japan built. Genuinely can't fathom why the two are so different in terms of rust, especially with juular's 2005 RAV4.

---

Following on from the previous post, I finally managed to drop the tank. Not too difficult if I bothered to take the petrol out in the first place. It's quite an object to move, especially on your own, two floor jacks made it easier.

I could not be bothered to battle with trying to remove the rubber pipe connecting the tank to the filler pipe. So I cut it.

Tomorrow, or Thursday at least, I will regret that. But at the time, I had enough and decided the knife knew best.

One strap looks great. The other strap looks a bit crusty but I didn't really look at it properly. There's nothing to these straps, so a strip of steel and it'll be good.

There will definitely be some rubber pipe components that need changing, especially in light of the E10 stuff. Some of the pipes also look a bit suspect.

Given the fuel tank is what it is, it was easier for someone before me to tie pipes to the tank that had corroded through with cable ties. A bit sketchy, so I might look to fashion some brackets before it goes back on.

That goes for the shields underneath too.

FYI - I had 20 litres of petrol in there, which are now (much to the delight of my wife) in the Peugeot 107. Filled the bloody thing I did!

[St.Jude]

Pay day fun day!

Purchased a new fuel filler pipe from t'eBay, along with a replacement rubber hose joint that I cut through. I am planning on rally style mud flaps as well, but the seller is away until the 7th April apparently so I didn't bother.

Looking in to replacing some of the hard lines of the fuel tank, and the rubber lines as well. But I want to do measurements of that first, and I seem to have misplaced my calipers.

Trying to find a local steel stockist now, instead of using The Metal Store like I have for the Lada. I've got one to go to (as they're not answering the phone) at lunchtime to see if they actually sell sheet steel, and if they'll deliver it. Otherwise they're going to be cutting it down to sizes that I can fit in my Peugeot 107. I've got some 1.2mm steel left, I have full sheets of 2mm and 0.8mm left, but I don't have enough of any of them for the RAV4. Plus I think it'll mostly benefit from 1mm steel anyway. 

Other than that, I've been editing the video of the subframe shenanigans. I haven't finished it, it's already over an hour long, and it really was a shit show. Audio's crap, head mounted camera filmed everything other than what I wanted, the phone fell over in places so I can hear what I was doing but not actually see it.

Still, you gotta laugh. 

[juular]

That fuel tank looks ok from the photo, a hand wire brush, bit of rust treatment painted on and a coat of paint and it should be ok. If it's rusty inside there's acid kits that you can mix up and fill the tank with that kill it off.

Online only steel sellers take the piss a bit. Do you have a FH Brundle within delivery distance? They are (usually) way cheaper than anywhere else for sheet steel. For me the Glasgow branch have always been excellent. Ordered online, £10 delivery (still £20 cheaper than picking it up from local place in my van) and it appears on my drive in a couple of days with a courtesy call to say they're going to be over. Their bolts and paint and sundries are insanely cheap. 

[St.Jude]

1 hour ago, juular said:

That fuel tank looks ok from the photo, a hand wire brush, bit of rust treatment painted on and a coat of paint and it should be ok. If it's rusty inside there's acid kits that you can mix up and fill the tank with that kill it off.

Online only steel sellers take the piss a bit. Do you have a FH Brundle within delivery distance? They are (usually) way cheaper than anywhere else for sheet steel. For me the Glasgow branch have always been excellent. Ordered online, £10 delivery (still £20 cheaper than picking it up from local place in my van) and it appears on my drive in a couple of days with a courtesy call to say they're going to be over. Their bolts and paint and sundries are insanely cheap. 

Yeah the tank itself is fine. It's more the lines themselves look a bit crusty. I'm going to treat the outside of the tank and fashion a new shield for it, as one is rotten.

As for the steel, I just came back from the place near me. Lovely bloke, one man band kind of thing, wanted £25 for two 1000mm x 750mm sheets (The Metal Store wanted £65 for the same, exc. delivery), I gave him £30 so he could have a pint when the pubs open back up. Had a chat with him about the RAV4, was surprised a man my age actually sought out a Lada!

Will definitely be going to him again. 

[juular]

Good price and a good find!

[GeorgeB]

8 hours ago, St.Jude said:

I am planning on rally style mud flaps as well,

I wouldn't do that. Rust traps, you know.

Oh.

[St.Jude]

1 hour ago, GeorgeB said:

I wouldn't do that. Rust traps, you know.

Oh.

NMFP after this!

[St.Jude]

So while I would like to remove the tow bar from the car, it is welded on with some unknown substance. Try as I might, with the heaviest of hammers and brute force, the thing is stuck on there for good. I had a quick look around it, smashed my screwdriver around it, all strong and good. So it'll benefit from a good wire brush, Jenolite bath and primer and it'll be good.

The rear differential came off, meaning now(!) I can start cutting, grinding, making a merry nuisance of myself. Before I started this, and I think it was mentioned before, the car would "clunk" from a standing start. Obviously this is a 25 year old machine with 25 year old rubber, and so I knew I would be changing the rear differential bushes.

What I didn't know though was that the "front" pair would contain one rubber that was properly gone. 

It's like plastic! And I now have a bolt stuck in situ with this bushes sleeve on it.

Now I bought the bushes thinking the brace/bracket would be alright. It was going to be the one job of this whole thing I'd outsource to someone with a hydraulic press, but I'm thinking I might just buy the bracket with new bushes already loaded. 

Anyway, I'm now underneath this thing surveying around the differential for any rot. I've found one already but it's quite local and a fairly small place. 

But the bit it joins up to, while I can't make a hole in it with the screwdriver, does feel fairly thin.

It really is in that area where you can see ive scraped the loose stuff off, and doesn't seem to be an issue on the sides leading to the floor. It's just the bottom of that section of the beam really that feels thin.

Rear suspension mounts look orange, because they are, but they're strong. 

So, without further ado, I'm off to get the angle grinder and raise hell. Starting with that beam!

[Leyland Worldmaster]

Wow! Just wow! You need some kind of medal for your hard work bringing this back to life! Great thread! 👍 👍 👍 😎 😎 😎 

[St.Jude]

I'm getting better at this CAD stuff.

Degreased the panel, applied weld through primer (I know), and now dragging my sorry arse under the car to prep that as well in the same way.

[warch]

Berbatov/Jude, I've seen bits of metal that have spent nearly 2000 years in the ground that were in better nick than those diff mounts. I must show this to someone next time they start regurgitating the same trite old bollocks about Toyota build quality. I suppose road salt isn't a thing in the Aussie Outback.

 

[St.Jude]

I mean in fairness @warch the mechanicals are sound. It's just the rest of it was built out of material thinner than the wallpaper lining I used for the template!

Odd afternoon really. I welded that piece on to the frame. Blew through the metal a few times, but 99% of it is welded and welded good. It's the best I've done, which doesn't say much!

I got some news though which took me away from doing the work (not bad news, everything is grand), and it started to rain a little, so I rattled through the welding and didn't fuck about filming and photographing it. Hopefully tomorrow the weather is like today, and that the wife doesn't demand I do something else, and I'll clean up what I've done and share it.

[Heidel_Kakao]

Inspiring stuff 😀 I will also probably need to weld up a rusty Toyota (Lexus) at some point in the future but hopefully not for a while yet.

[bunglebus]

Did someone use this to take boats in and out of the sea before you bought it? 

[St.Jude]

10 hours ago, Heidel_Kakao said:

Inspiring stuff 😀 I will also probably need to weld up a rusty Toyota (Lexus) at some point in the future but hopefully not for a while yet.

Tell you one thing, the way I feel this morning is less than inspiring! I saw the weather, thought "Fuck yes, it's raining so I can't go out!". Now I realise it's stopped raining, it won't rain again today, so I really do need to go out and sort it. And I physically hurt from that one patch yesterday!

48 minutes ago, bunglebus said:

Did someone use this to take boats in and out of the sea before you bought it? 

It'd make sense! But I don't think so. The joys of second hand shitery at the lower end of the market.

[juular]

Well done. Just looking at this is giving me the shivers remembering my Celica. 

Really don't get how Toyota suspension components get so bad! It's like they're painted in salt from the factory.

 

[St.Jude]

I would just now like to say that yes, I am well aware the following is ugly.

Yes, I am well aware that it's amateurish.

Yes, I can boogie.

It's a total bitch of an area to weld. It's a total bitch of an area to grind. It's a total bitch of an area to make pretty. But, I have the first repair done. I've banged on it with a hammer, I have ground down some welds, and I can see by the discolouration of the steel I have applied good heat penetration.

I am waiting for it to cool down, and I will be priming it now as I may have had a dose of metal fume fever from Saturday, and I'm not totally over it, but I did manage to snag a respirator mask today and done what you see here.

I have improved in my welding, as the repair panels I've made have been bob on and the preparation has been far, far longer than what I did before, and I am getting that sizzling bacon sound when I do it. It spattered in places, and I've lingered too long in others, but honestly I should have just taken the rear axles off completely to get good access to this place. Which, considering everything that's gone on before, I am willing to have an ugly weld compared to having to change more components and suffer with Toyota component corrosion. 

 

[juular]

It looks like it has penetrated ok, welding upside down is always ugly as it can be hard to see to judge the travel speed, and all the molten metal wants to run down your head.  It's at least 5373748439.79 times better than any MOT patch. 

Get some seam sealant on the welds as there will be holes (even when the welds are pretty), and if you can blow some cavity wax through the rail even better, as the primer burns back leaving an exposed area.

Are you using galv sheet?

[St.Jude]

2 hours ago, juular said:

It looks like it has penetrated ok, welding upside down is always ugly as it can be hard to see to judge the travel speed, and all the molten metal wants to run down your head.  It's at least 5373748439.79 times better than any MOT patch. 

Get some seam sealant on the welds as there will be holes (even when the welds are pretty), and if you can blow some cavity wax through the rail even better, as the primer burns back leaving an exposed area.

Are you using galv sheet?

Yeah it's a crap place to weld, and the place where I was comfortable the rear drum was in the way, then another place the helmet was coming off. So I was flat on the ground, watching those globs of metal forming and I'd hold my breath when the odd one fell. 

I've got to drill a hole in that plate, as it had one originally, and when I do that I'll grind back more of what I've done and apply the seam sealer I've got. It's looking like Friday, Saturday, Monday and Tuesday are available for me to do the welding so I'm hoping to get at least one arch and sill done!

The steel isn't galvanised, I don't think. He did say he usually only had that but had this mild steel in stock which was handy. 

[St.Jude]

It took me long enough, given various cameras didn't work or filmed everything BUT the stuff I was doing, and the external audio trick I thought would work didn't, but here's the video for everything I was dealing with above. In a lovely 1 hour long video. Just in time when you need to get away from the 5 random people who have decided to descend on your garden this weekend!

I'm out today at this thing, cutting the rotten arch at the back passenger side and move forward along towards the sill. 

[St.Jude]

How it started:

How it's going:

There's not a lot I can do now as both the area on the car and the repair panels are both drying with the weld through stuff. Tomorrow I'll be welding upside down (again - joy) and then I can move on to the arch.

That panel was a pain in the arse. I had the size right, but it also had a curve that I didn't appreciate until I had the panel made up. Plus the bottom of the arch gets welded on to this panel.

I could cut all the rot out now, but I'm wary of cutting a load of steel from the car and leaving it for a day or two before I weld something back.

[St.Jude]

It's not a Saturday without an update I suppose.

The new panel from yesterday is welded in place. Needs cleaning up as always, given it was another upside down welding job.

I've really been spending today working out how best to proceed with the arch repairs. I don't want to introduce the same mud shelf that the car had which caused a lot of this rot to begin with. 

So, as I welded that section, I went to see how much of the arch was sound at the rear.

You might see some spot welds there, and it welds on to a box section which is fairly perfect (from what I can see with the air vent removed). Although some rot has been introduced to it. So I think here I need to try and cut the rotten bits off of this section without damaging the rear section, and have that as a nice clean section to weld to.

The further forward I went along the arch, the more rot I saw. A good section of the steel that holds the fuel filler spout is rotten.

Inside the RAV4  there's a cubby hole, so I decided to remove it. Doing that gives a good view in to the arch from the inside. Doing that also showed that the outer skin was also showing signs some form of rot. Well, the beginnings of it.

I am probably wrong doing this, but given that the arch joining the outer shell was rotten, I decided I might as well cut the outside to give me a better chance of repairing it properly. Which I did.

At this point it's worth pointing out two things. I've sank 8 bottles of Aldi-wannabe Peroni lager called Rossini, and I forgot to charge the batteries to my drill. So trying to type this is a challenge, and trying to find out what metal under the sporadic rust proofing is also difficult with no drill. The last job I did was cut what I thought was rotten from the bottom front of the arch. Essentially the part closest to the door.

 

I'm having Easter Sunday off from this, and the wife mentioned that Monday might rain. Thanks Jesus, etc. 

[St.Jude]

We had a smattering of snow this morning, as if someone was on the roof shaking the dandruff off their head. Which meant the day has turned out to be glorious weather wise.

Rot wise, it's anything but. And I'm now stuck with a decision to make.

I'm dealing with the sill on the passenger side, given the above/last post it's kinda rotten here and only the second item on the MOT list that needed doing.

I've had to cut the repair section from the sill (as in the previous repair) as it's rotten behind it. As you can see.

Inside the sill is where I have a dilemma, based on how the Lada is put together. So the Lada has an inner, middle and outer sill. That was in my head when I saw this:

That last photo, where I'm zoomed up to it, was connected to the sill below.

So on the outset, I don't think that bit of steel in the middle is all that important, given that the previous repairer to me cut part of it off. That section also doesn't run down the whole length of the sill, just seemed to be joined to it in this particular area.

The question is: can I continue to weld the outer sill on to the car and it'll be fine? Or do I have to attempt to add a section to the inner sill and then weld that in to the complete repair?

Advice - other than weighing it in which is being considered again - is sought and welcomed!

[St.Jude]

Did a quick bit of Googling, and the only talk of sills were down to inner and outer sills. As in, kerbside and inboard. Nothing mentioned of a part of the sill inside the actual sill. So I'll get that cut out tomorrow.

During the Googling, I stumbled on Part 3 of a restoration of a RAV4 that Toyota UK did. I can't begin to tell you how filled with joy* I was when they mentioned this:

"As a much more complex moulding, it was not viable to custom fabricate the area from scratch"

Why? Because Toyota make the repair panels for it still. I've no prices, but given that Heritage UK want £100 for a complete inner sill, and that Toyota wanted £500 for a subframe, and £500 for a wishbone,  I'm going to guess that Toyota will want about more than I'm willing to pay for one. So the chap writing the restoration blog can do one, it's viable to do it as a custom repair when you haven't got two pennies to throw off Blackpool tower!

 

*Sarcasm

[rickvw72]

That looks like reinforcement panel, probably for the rear jack point on the sill.

If you remove it, beware of the 2 post ramp. If you patch it, it just wants to be strong, not pretty. The sill should probably be welded to three layers on the bottom flange front and back, two in the middle.

[St.Jude]

29 minutes ago, rickvw72 said:

That looks like reinforcement panel, probably for the rear jack point on the sill.

If you remove it, beware of the 2 post ramp. If you patch it, it just wants to be strong, not pretty. The sill should probably be welded to three layers on the bottom flange front and back, two in the middle.

I wasn't going to remove it, as it's already been cut off previously. I'd need to cut some of it off to stop the rot anyway. 

Yeah I'm considering using some 2mm steel for this section instead of the 1mm stuff. Or rob some of the Lada's 1.2mm stock...

 

[rickvw72]

I’d try to do it as originally intended, so I’d fold a run of steel to go from the remains of the intermediate sill, down to the bottom flange.
Repair floor or inner sills, plug weld to this new bit, grind and then plug weld the outer sill or patch to it. You’d then have three seperate 1mm bits joined, and full strength. 
Welding 2mm to Japanese tin would be a challenge I’d guess, without blowing a golf course amount of holes anyway.