L200 refurbishment: what a full rebuild involves, stage by stage

Ring first. Tell us what the truck is and what you want out of it; five minutes on the phone saves a lot of email. Then send photographs of the arches, sills, underside and engine bay. We can tell a lot from a dozen decent photos. You get a written quote priced per truck and broken down by job, so you can see exactly what you are paying for. Nothing is a package. Then we agree a slot and a timescale.

The arches and sills are where a K74 goes, and they are usually worse than they look from three feet away. On the truck in our case study the rot went straight through the outer skin into the inner structure behind it. Our rule is that rot is cut right back to clean steel and new sections are let in and welded, rather than filled and hidden. Then the panels are filled where they need it, flatted and primed. This is the stage that decides whether a respray lasts two years or twenty.

The rear tub comes off and the truck goes on stands so the chassis, axle and springs can be seen properly; you cannot quote metalwork honestly until you can see all of it. The underside is stripped back, treated and protected. On a full rebuild the chassis comes out, goes away to be coated, and goes back in, and every arm, damper and brake goes on new while it is apart, because it will never be this accessible again.

Suspension is lifted to your specification if you want it, with the geometry set and the truck road tested. Pro steels, refurbished OEM alloys, or whatever you have in mind.

If the truck is otherwise sound, the Red Top programme is available on its own: 25 line items of work on the 4D56, and 161 bhp and 30 mpg out the other side on Spec 2. If the engine has already gone, that is not the end of the truck. Rob’s L200 went bang at sixteen years old, and rather than scrap it he had a new engine, fresh paint and a set of modifications; his own account is on our testimonials page.

Paint is done in our own temperature-controlled bake oven, in one colour or two, split wherever you want it. Where the original decals are past saving they are redrawn to scale against the vehicle profile, cut and laid on by hand in house. Interiors are retrimmed to order, with leather, cloth, colours and trim yours to choose, and the small things that date a truck, badges and lamps, get dealt with at the same time.

It depends entirely on what the truck needs, which is why the quote is written per job. For a sense of scale, in our customers’ own words: one bespoke Dakar X build took just shy of four weeks, and two Dakar builds for a pair of customers were collected a week after the first phone call. A refurbishment with heavy metalwork will take longer than either. We agree the timescale when we book it in, and you see photographs as the work goes on.