A different project:
P.J. and Melissa's 1972 Suzuki LJ10
This Valentine's Day Melissa bought P.J. this fun little Suzuki LJ10.  It is a 1972, and has a two cylinder two stroke motor.  With help from John we were able to get it running and took it home from the high school in the back of P.J.'s truck.  Now it will be an ongoing project for us, and eventually will become a neat little Rhino / Ranger substitute with license plates.  Check back for more pictures as the project progresses.
3/1/08: Here you can see that we got John's old Beard seats installed.  I had to fabricate some simple mounts, but the seats fit quite nicely and there's still room for the roll cage.
2/24/08: Here I am unloading the LJ from the truck, which was made slightly trickier by the fact it didn't have working brakes.  After a little time adding an ignition switch, checking fluids, and bleeding the brakes it made a short trip around our front yard.  Check out the video on You Tube by clicking here.  It seemed to smoke just a bit, huh?  Welll it tended to flood out too.  After working on the carburator, I got it to run much nicer, as shown in the video here.
...and there's definitely lots more to come.  Check back for updates.
3/7/08: Here are some trailer lights we found at AutoZone that can mount in front of the stock holes so they end up nice and recessed in the body.  All four rear lights, both side turn signals, and both front turn signals are in and working with the running lights and turn signals.
3/15/08: This weekend's project was replacing the stock master cylinder with one from a Samurai. The old one was single circuit, and was leaking from every possible place.  With the samurai one, the front and rear brakes will be separate, which required adding a brake line from the master cylinder to the junction block where the rear brakes used to split off. The brake light switch was also relocated to this junction block to fill the extra hole.
These are actually the tires for our dually, but the LJ can dream about how they'd look with a few inches of lift...
4/6/08:  This Sunday we took the LJ up to Phelan.  We all got to drive it around at John and Anna's, and it did great.  I even put the LJ to work moving our old pontoon boat around. What a fun little jeep.
9/29/08:  Today was a big day for the LJ.  After working on the brakes, lights, and voltage regulator over the summer (between river trips and Coral Pink) we took it to the DMV.  The result: WE HAVE PLATES!  It is registered as a street legal automobile in California.  This achieves one of our major goals for the project, and motivates us to get out and use it.
10/9/08:  Here are some pics of minor progress on the LJ since it got its big car plates.  I had to figure out a place to mount them!  We plasma cut a piece of steel at the high school to mount in front of the hitch to hang the rear plate and I found a bracket at AutoZone for the front one. I added a LED license plate light and wired in a 4 pole connector to hook up the lights when we flat tow the LJ.
Here's a trick we did just before taking it to the DMV.  We had our trailer lights mounted to the fenders, and some plain amber lenses with no way to attach them.  I ended up cutting some nylon wire clamps and screwing them to the original light mounting holes to allow the lens to snap in place.  It works, and looks better than screw holes...
10/28/08:  The Super Swampers are here!  Over the weekend our baby super swampers arrived and John and I got them mounted on Dean's Samurai wheels.  They should be just perfect for the LJ and will require little or no lift but are wider, slightly taller, and more modern than the original NDT tires they'll be replacing.  I'll post more pics once I have them on.
11/3/08:  Tonight I got the Super Swamper put on and they look great.  They don't seem to rub, even without any lift.  Tomorrow I will tow it to the high school to start work on the roll cage.
11/4/08:  Tonight the LJ returned to the high school, this time being flat towed. With John, Dean, Jim, and Dave's help we got a great start on the roll cage.  We got all three main bars bent and tacked together.  Next time we will make the mounting plates and do the finish welding, as well as add a couple of more bars to support the cage.
11/15/08:  This week we finished welding the LJ cage and added the extra bars.  I like how it turned out, and we got it ready to load today for Glamis next weekend.  I owe a big Thank You to John and Dean for getting this done.  Thanks guys.