hot auto review

Man, this weekend was a long one.  Florida treated us to some nice hot weather with nary a cloud in sight so we decided to just go off on a tangent and do something totally rash.

This weekend’s project started off in a really strange fashion.  You’re not going to believe me when I tell you that the whole removal of the interior started with me going outside to clean the windows.  Yeah, a likely excuse and I’m sticking to it.

You see, I knew that there was a rather large rust hole in the driver’s side foot well that needed to be taken care of before the car ever went on the road so I wanted to address that.  After peeling the carpet back a bit I just decided to gut the interior completely.  Thirty minutes later, it was all out, teal house carpet and all.  For this reason (and many others), I love old cars.  I also love the fact that there were only 2 seat bolts present out of a more safe 6-8 that I would prefer. 

I also figured out why the car was missing the driver’s side seat belt/retractor.  The bolt holding the assembly was cross threaded and snapped completely off.  So while I was there, I drilled out the bolt in a rather crooked fashion and replaced the bolt with a grade-8 bolt/nut combination to retain the $2 scrap-yard seatbelt (score!). 

The whole time I was screwing around with the seatbelt, my girlfriend was attacking the floorboards with a vengeance.  She was on a serious seek-and-destroy mission for rust, weird rubbery underbody coatings and other things that weren’t supposed to be there.  Somewhere along the time line of past owners, one of them decided that blue RTV silicone would be a great way to patch rusty pin-holes.  They also thought that spraying over rusty metal with rubberized underbody coating would be a good idea.  All I can see that the underbody coating did was retain moisture and *** off my girlfriend. 

Personally, I didn’t really care that some of the rubbery stuff was still present but she set out to make it ALL go away.  Armed with a putty knife or two, some wire brushes and a vendetta, shiny metal was once again present.  I couldn’t believe my eyes! 

Sometime in-between all of the cursing at floors, I decided to attack the trunk floor.  This was a pretty easy job as there wasn’t much left of said trunk floor.  It was mostly powdered metal that I scraped at for a bit and then swept out of the various holes in the floor and rear quarter panel.  Ashes to ashes, rust to rust.

It was a really long two days and we’re not even done yet.  I’m really glad that my girlfriend shares such enthusiasm and love for this car, it wouldn’t be the same without her or her hard work and inspiration.

Until next time,

~Craig

Photos by Craig A. and Julia C.