The first big obstacle

This weekend I finally got the interior completely gutted, and pulled back the carpet to reveal two pieces of shitty sheet metal pop riveted over the rear seat floor-pan, where the passengers put their feet. I instantly knew what that meant. There was rust, and the cheezy PO fixed it using the ostrich-head-in-the-sand method. If you can't see it, it isn't there. So tonight I drilled the rivets out and pulled the sheet-metal out.

This is one of the things I was afraid of. While the front floor pans will need a little (very little) work, the rears are in bad shape. My only problem is I don't know how bad-a shape they are. I know this will mean cutting and welding...whether it's beyond my grasp to do it is another question entirely.

And so for the record, here are my rusted-ass floor pans:

Passenger Side:



Driver's Side:

Generic Updat

I haven't posted for a while. A trip down to disney followed by a crazy work week has kept me from doing too much to the mustang, and completely kept me away from posting here. I have a huge update on the gauge cluster coming soon, but I am still waiting for some paint for my needles, and don't want to start posting pictures until the cluster is done. I know starting with the gauge cluster is backwards, but I have always loved interior work, and on my car (despite what the pictures might indicate, the interior is going to require the least work and money...so I'd rather start there and move forward. And the gauges was something I could start on before I even got the car here, so when the car showed up I wanted to stay on that train of thought.

Anyway, I also threw away about 1500 pounds of shit that was floating around in the interior (Otto the garbage man will be pleased on tuesday) and pulled the seats, to start rehabbing them. The front seats are actually from a 71-73 Mach 1, which has a pattern I adore, but they severely need a new set of covers. When i installed them a hundred years ago, I was very unhappy with my mounting system on the passenger side. It just didn't seem right. I was pretty ignorant then, and when I pulled them out I realized the problem...the seat is WAY out of "true" and was so twisted it was impossible to install correctly. So I tore the skin off to reveal some of the crappiest welding I've ever seen (and I am GOOD at crappy damn welding) so I've decided the passenger seat bottom frame is pretty much unusable. So I get to start looking for a replacement. This has me nervous because I had only planned on recovering the seats, and this could severely reset my budget. We'll have to see if ebay or the internet elsewhere has the right part at the right price to keep me on track.

I also had another couple of blunders. One was simple...when installing the white face on the speedo, I tore it and had to throw it out. Fortunately, I had scanned the face patterns before I started so I printed another speedo cover out at home, and it worked fine.

The other problem, I had ordered a later model transmission shifter cover, and got an amazing deal on ebay, getting an 80 dollar shifter cover for 11 bucks, shipping included. Well, I wanted to change the colors on the dial indicator, so I tried using nail polish mover to remove the paint, and softened the plastic indicator so much that it got marred up. So I am going to try to duplicate my amazing find, because just replacing the plastic dial indicator would cost more than I paid for the entire cover! I also got a little nail polish remover on the shifter cover, and messed up a little of the paint. I was going to just spray over that to fix it, but now that I'm going to buy a whole new unit, I'll just pitch the one I boogered up.

anyway, that's all for now. Look for some gauge picture soon!