Clean-up on Bay 2 and other Forensics

As my digging through the car continued I decided that it would be best to gut the interior to get an idea of what I had that was good. The carpet was the first to go. Usually you remove the seats, then pull the carpet. Not needed here. It didn’t put up a fight. I just started pulling and it came up and out in pieces. Believe it or not, I actually put a dust mask on. It was quite a site. The dust cloud was a combination of moldy padding, dried carpet fibers, and New Mexico desert.

After the storm settled, I vacuumed out the rest along with the seats. Actually even though the seat fabric was faded and worn, only a couple of seams and piping had failed. Everything else was in decent shape.

The plastic package tray (rear deck) was faded tan, but solid. The door cards were ok, the padding around the front windows was shot. And the headliner, saggy as it was, was in one piece. The headliner will become one of next projects.

I removed the seats vacuumed again and then was a little disappointed. Under the pedal, there was small rust holes. I had really hoped there was no serious rust but there it was. Once I got all of the parts and junk out of the trunk, was in nice shape-no surprises.

So as I assessed the condition of the interior, I realized I was really in pretty good shape. To have decent seats was a positive. I’ve seen some restoration projects that didn’t have any or they were just springs. All of the door cards were there along with the trim. That would prove valuable when making new patterns. And the headliner, even though it wasn’t great, it was there. Those are often rotted, eaten through by critters or just plain gone. The dash was cracked and beyond repair. That would be yet another project. And the floors had rust just where wet feet rest, and in this case the window seal had been leaking for years.

However, there was yet another parts mystery to solve. As you can see by this picture this piece of chrome was really pitted and rusted. I had two such pieces in the car. all the other chrome was in really good shape with little pitting. I stood there trying to figure out how come these were in such bad shape while the others were not. Was it a sub standard chrome job? Perhaps. How could this chrome be so rusted. Then I realized, these pieces were likely on the 65 they were restoring and got swapped out. To bolster my case, the stainless screws I removed from the trim were the wrong sizes. Oh well, thus is the life of a secret donor car.

Overall, I thought I was in pretty good shape. Next comes the headliner.