The Beast? No, but I understand he had issues with rust as well. I saw one dumped out at Mt Isa yonks ago, and it had no rust because it is so dry out there. I had rust on the A pillars, sills, doors, rear wheel arches and the boot. I taught myself to use a stick welder to weld in repair bits but ended up buying a mig. The tail lights would always stop working because dirt and dust would get in there, or the earth would just become dirty and I was forever getting them working. The original wiring for the lights had no relay, so the headlight and dipper switches, and the connectors, would burn out. Same for the factory driving lights. I ended up installing a later model steering column with the headlight flasher/high beam and wiper/washer control on steering column mounted stalks, then added fused relays for low and high beam and the driving lights.
I installed an Edelbrock Performer manifold on it, but then I had to instal a spacer between it and the carby as it would get vapour lock in summer. Holly made some rubbish carby's so I ended up putting a Carter on it, but by then I was sick of carby's and wanted EFI. I also installed an oil temp gauge, only to find out that in the NT cruising at 180 for a couple of hours, the oil temp shot off the gauge at over 150 degrees C, so an oil cooler fixed that. I installed late model upper arms, late model steering box- by the end only the shell and panels were original. By far the best things I did was to put the 5 speed in and the 4 wheel discs. But with 10in wide rims on the back, I was chewing out rear axle bearings like you would not believe, which was why I was looking at a fully floating rear end.
I drove it pretty hard, and with the 30mm front sway bar I pulled the mounting bracket of the chassis rails, and with the rear springs I also broke a U bolt. The poor old thing had really copped a caning and there I was still giving it heaps. I took a mate who loved his BMW for a run, and at the end he said he did not believe these cars could handle so well. My boss at the time bought the car off me, and despite all that had been done to it, he was surprised that it had no rattles or squeaks and drove so well. Considering the money I threw at it, I guess it should be good.
