seats and carpets out

Ok, so this is the first post I'm writing on the day after I did the work...from now on my blog will be "real time".

Taking the seats out of my car had one enormous advantage over every other part of the tear down: I did it before! When I changed the shifter boot last summer I had to take out the front seats and carpet, so this time it was easy. I stashed the seats in my basement. The seats are probably going to go back in the car, but I will be at the very least replacing the foam...we'll see what else when the time comes.

The headliner is probably original, since it doesn't look like the windshield or backlite have ever been taken out, and it certainly has fading in all the right places.

The dirt was everywhere on the interior. 

Rust inside the car is minimal, which is fueling my feeling that parts of the car may have been replaced in the past. The most serious rust is at the drivers side rear wheel arch; I may have to do some minor patching here in due course.

I can't make my mind up about the padding under the rear seat - the yellow material underneath does not look 40+ years old, but it is cut just right. In any case it will be replaced, I'm just keeping it for now in case I need something to cut round.

The padding in the foot wells is like somebody's old blanket from the scouts. There is no way this is original, and it doesn't keep out much (if any) noise or heat from the motor. I was deafened but engine noise when I drove this car home from the mid-west. It might come in useful for something, but I can't think what...

I am a bit suspicious about the passenger side, as I know the door has been replaced (this story is coming up in my blog in the next post). There is a lot more investigation to do here to figure out which bits of the car are original. Apart from some minor rust in the drivers foot well, the floor pans are in superb condition. The foot well looks worse than it is in this picture because the rust has stuck to lots of "blanket" fibers. I'll have to get all that cleaned off before I can properly asses it.

The parcel shelf is in awful condition - bad enough to be original in fact, and is also made of some really naff hardboard. I'll be keeping this one to use as a guide, but something different will be going here for sure. 

The padding under the parcel shelf will also be replaced....in any case the original stuff fell apart when I tried to pick it up. Something tells me a decent sound system will be blasting out of this area in due course.

Overall the back of the interior and the trunk are in tremendous shape in terms of rust - the hardly is any. This was the reason I bought this car in the first place, as I didn't want to have to do extensive welding and fabrication on my first project - I think there is a good chance I would have lost interest early on maybe even never got started if the job was that big.

lights and electrical

When I took the back up lamps off, the housing was filled with forty years worth of dirt and grit. Somewhere under there is a lamp housing!

Like everything else on the car, the exterior housing was covered with red over-spray.

After a bit of work with the wire wool, I was able to get a real nice shine on the lamps.

I am packing all my cleaned up parts into boxes for reassembly sometime in the future.

The housing on the front marker lights was in real bad shape: covered in rust and splattered with something that looks like tar.

I may be able to clean up the housing brackets with media blasting....but will probably end up getting some replacements in better shape. We'll see what happens.

Although the car is a Sprint Promotion A model, it did not come from the factory with GT fog lamps - these are recently installed repros which I may swap for the OEM amber bulbs when I rebuild.

Plug connectors for the fog lamps were squeezed through an adjusted gap in the grille. A few other minor modifications have been made to the grille to accommodate the support brackets, but since I will be putting the fog lamps back anyway it doesn't matter.

There was an incredible amount of grot in the areas behind the headlamps. I am hoping to have the car torn down and the body washed before I got to the INDY 500 at the end of May.

As with so many other things, the retaining rings in front of the headlamps were covered with over-spray.

It is vitally important to properly label all the electrical connectors, even if you are planning to use a replacement wiring harness.

gas tank

The gas tank is theoretically easy to remove, but for me it was a real PITA! I started by siphoning off the gas and transferring it to one of my other cars, and then I ran the car for a few minutes to get rid of the last bit of gas. It's best if you do the last bit outside of the garage unless you want to get CO poisoning.

Disconnecting the fuel line and sender unit underneath the gas tank is easy.

I didn't need to look at the filler-pipe-to-tank connector for long to work out that it was a repro.

The fuel filler pipe should be fitted with a cork gasket. This one is a recent replacement and is good enough to reuse. The filler pipe looks like it may be original.

I cleaned up the filler pipe with a wire wheel. If I decide to get this plated later, I will need to do a better job of the polishing. 

The fuel tank is held in with a dozen or so bolts...and a mother-lode of what looked like rubberized gasket sealer (?). After I removed the bolts, I tried prying on the edge of the gas tank but it was stuck fast. The trunk was already pretty well scratched up, but I still did not want to go in with a crow bar. In the end I tried an idea from one of the guys on VMF. I basically put the floor jack under the gas tank*, lifted the car up until the wheels were off the ground, and then let the car sink back down. It took about 20 minutes, but then the gas tank lifted straight out. *If you're going to do this, you need something to spread the load out over the whole of the gas tank. I used a three foot section of 2x12 lumber I had in the garage.

Getting the goop off of the tank and the car was a nightmare...it was slightly soluble in penetrating oil, but even so, it is a really messy business getting rid of it. I must have used a million shop towels...but eventually it was all gone and I could stash the gas tank in the basement.