It had already been everywhere.

A Land Cruiser 100 Series with a roof tent on the rack, a bull bar on the front and mud tyres on steel rims. Not a mall car. This one gets driven somewhere and slept on top of.

That is the useful thing about a vehicle like this arriving. It has been on gravel, through water, parked near the sea, and the underside carries a record of all of it. Rust across the axle housings, around the diff, along the chassis rails and over the fuel tank — the flat surfaces that collect what the road throws up and then hold it there.

None of it was structural. That is usually the case with a Cruiser, and it is also the reason people leave it alone for too long.

So it went the full route. Everything masked off, wheels away, bash plates out, every surface back to bare metal and neutralised before anything went on. Then the coating, the oil, and cavity wax through the sections.

The photographs below are worth reading in order. The yellow tape is masking — brake lines, breathers and anything that must stay clean get wrapped before a drop of product is applied. That is the stage most people never see, and it is a fair amount of the job.