Disassembly and discovery

Tonight I checked on the state of the heater, since the hoses are disconnected and bypassed. As it turns out, the heater box is broken. It’s a $180+ fiberglass box. I’m debating whether to just buy new, or repair this one. A good little chunk is missing, but I have the fiberglass and epoxy here from some wheel pant repair I did. I’ll sleep on that for a day or two before deciding. It would take me a couple of evenings to lay up new glass, clean it up and shoot some paint on it. It’s not like it’s going to show, it just needs to be functional and not too ugly.

I also found one of the most ghetto examples of defect hiding I’ve ever seen. I mean, I saw the telltale globs of pink putty and knew there was some crap work done up front, but this… holy crap. A nice big rust hole under the hood was filled with a great big glob of clear RTV silicone, smoothed out and painted over. I’m not making this up. I have no idea what else I’m going to find up there, but it’s getting a little ominous. Oh well… I did budget for nasty surprises and outside labor for welding. It will just take a fender apron and some labor to cut out the old and weld in the new. If I’m lucky, maybe even just an extension piece. That was the passenger side, I haven’t checked out the driver side yet. Gotta make a run to the hangar before the snow gets too deep… it seems ALL of my 3/8 ratchets have migrated there. I’m not taking the rest of those fender bolts out with nothing but a flex handle.

On the bright side, the more I dig into the interior, the better things look. It’s looking like two people attacked this car at different times. One did the absolute worst job imaginable, and all his stuff needs to be ripped out and re-done — plus fixing the additional damage his work caused. The other tried to do it right, even if kind of cheap, and it just needs to be cleaned up and fixed a little. The dash just needs a new bezel for the instrument cluster. The original AM radio works (the speaker is toast, of course). All the controls seem to be operational and looking OK — I can run them through the brass tumbler and polish them up with some walnut shell media.

I started chipping and scraping away all the primer and filler and caulk and gunk and other crap around the windshield and rear window. I was afraid I’d find rust in the A pillars or around the rear window; aside from surface rust there’s very little. So far, all of the “seriously wrong” seems to be concentrated in one little corner of the car. I’m beginning to suspect a botched collision repair in the distant past, but it’s really too early to tell until I get those fenders off. For that, I’ll need more room in the garage so I can swing the doors fully open. Another day.