6-21-2010

Well the Spit is home…and now it won’t leave!

Kevin and I brought it back from Cherryville, NC on Saturday and my lovely wifey seems to have taken a hankering to it (That’s my Southern saying for today) The kids are also fighting over who gets the car.

My Starbuck (wife) and I tore the interior out and then, while she stripped the seats, I did an assessment of the condition of the car.
Not good is a huge understatement.

There is a LOT more wrong with this car than I thought.

Bad; the driver floorboard has the most Mickey-Mouse repair I’ve ever seen. Home fiberglass insulation on the floorboard with a galvanized piece of sheet metal riveted to the rotten floorboard with bondo smeared over the underside.

The rear of the same side has steel welded over the top of the floorboard with wires running under the metal so they can’t be accessed! The underside was coated with fiberglass instead of bondo.

Worse; the steel on the sides of the footwells where they meet the floorboards is rotted away on both sides. Luckily this car is not a unit-body or it would have collapsed by now. I’m going to have to cut that all away and weld in new steel.
The carpet is reusable but the seats are completely shot. We bought cheapo seat covers and I’ll be cutting out foam rubber with an electric carving knife to rebuild the seats.

I bought new hardboard to cut out the interior and door panels and we picked a dark synthetic material to cover the panels in.

I stripped out the trunk, cleaned and primed it and painted it the Navy blue that the rest of the car will be. After we got the interior out I also got most of the rust off the driver’s floorboards and put down rust converter. I’m going to start cutting metal this weekend and we’ll find out how go of a novice welder I am.

I found out that many parts for this car are simply not available. I had to manufacture new seals for the rear lights and backup light housings out of sheet cork. Judging by the limited number of replacement parts available, I think I’m going to wind up having to improvise a lot with this car.