THE BUILD
Scroll the steps on the left. The photo follows along.
Arrival & Inspection
Nothing gets touched until it is on the hoist and on record. This is the Defender exactly as it came in, underbody and all. We photograph and film every stage as we go, before and after, and the owner gets the whole set along with the truck. None of this work can be seen once the vehicle is back on its wheels, so the record is how you know what was actually done.
Dry Ice Blast
Dinitrol ML + 4941 is only as good as the surface underneath it. Spray it over salt, oil, or loose scale and the problem is sealed in rather than solved. The film lets go later and the corrosion keeps working out of sight. So the underside gets treated before any coating comes near it. Solid CO2 pellets freeze the contamination until it releases.
Rust Conversion
Blasting clears what is loose. It cannot undo rust that has already eaten into the steel, and a Defender chassis gives rust plenty of places to do that. So the converter goes on wet, over every rusted patch. The acid in it reacts with the iron oxide instead of covering it. The rust becomes iron phosphate, and you can see it happen: treated areas turn chalky and pale, then stay that way rather than spreading.
Masking & Prep
Anything that stays uncoated gets covered first. The body goes under sheeting, and underneath it the exhaust, driveline, brake lines, and every component that runs hot or has to move gets masked off on its own. It is slow work and it is the part nobody ever sees, but coating the wrong thing is worse than coating nothing at all. The converter carries on working while the masking goes up.
Coating
Dinitrol ML + 4941 goes on in two parts, and the ML goes in first. A Defender chassis rusts from the inside out, so getting at the outside of it is only half the job. We pull the water plugs and run a wand down inside the box sections and frame rails, filling the cavity from within wherever there is an opening, then refit the plugs. Then 4941 lays a thick, wax-based film over the open underbody. Nothing is left out for being hard to get at, and every surface it touches was blasted clean, treated where it needed treating, and masked beforehand.
Finished Truck
The masking comes off and the coating gets the time it needs to cure. Then the Defender goes home better protected underneath than it was the day it was built. Clean steel, rust stabilised rather than buried under a coating, cavity wax worked into the seams, and a sealed film between the chassis and every Ontario winter ahead of it.
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