Had a few weeks off so i am working on a few projects that i have been wanting to get done for a while.

My limited fenders and rockers have seen better days. I had some deep scratches from overgrown trails. I debated heavily before making the decision to go ahead and use Rust Oleum bed liner on the flares and lower rocker panel cover. I am hoping that this will hold up better than regular paint. The other positive was that they will be easy to touch up if i ever need to. My initial impression is that i like how this turned out. I think that if you do not go to heavy with your coats you can some texture without it being overwhelming. Time will tell how well it holds up and if its going to be a pain to clean.



I did not want to paint the lower door limited trim with the bed liner so i just used black spay paint. I wanted to Flares to look separate from the rest of the cladding. So far I am not really liking this and am debating on repainting a different color or just continuing with bed liner. I am going to give it a few more days before i make a decision.



I had a few cans of Plasti Dip. Got bored in between coats on limited flares so i decided to try something with it. This is more of an experiment than anything else. I love the fact that i can just peel it off. My initial impression is that i like it when driving at night as it reduces glare off the hood. I also plan on getting a LED light bar mounted on the roof and my understanding is that those can produce heavy glare as well.



I had a few broken mounts on my old grill and it was barely hanging on. decided to build color matched grill with mesh insert. This was a fairly involved project. All you have to do is look at the many satoshi threads to get an idea of how do do it. I do not know if i will add a "Toyota or TRD" to the grill i kinda like the clean debadged look. I followed BigFishAllDay pretty much to a T. His method with zip ties works perfect.



Back in October i was in Arroyo Grande, CA at the Oceano Dunes. I ended up getting stuck pretty bad pretty far back from the coastline. It was my first time wheeling in deep sand and long story short poor line choice hesitating and loosing momentum resulted in one of the worst recoveries i have had to do. I tried to dig out but every shovel full was immediately refilled by the dune above. Pictures don't look to bad but i was not going anywhere.





Having virtually no options to winch out and having not heard or seen anyone for hours I decided pull the cable try to go diagonally back to a fence that was almost fully buried in the dune behind me. I knew this was going to be a bad idea but i was running out of options and decided to give it a try. crunch pop

Broken Cable



Bent Fairlead. Bottom left in pic.



Being that i was going to have to replace the cable and the fairlead i decided to go ahead and pull the entire bumper. I used primer and spray paint 1.5 years ago and it was not holding up well. Sent that to be sand blasted and powder coated. I also did not have bumper fillers under my headlights and it always looked bad to me. Rock Auto parts and some Desert Dune Matched paint left over from the new grill. My XRC8 winch was also faded and chalky so decided to paint it. Pretty happy with the face lift. Here is where i am at now with a refreshed front end.