Decided to try and document this car as I go. I run my own business so most of the time it's 30 minutes here, 45 minutes there on my projects. But hopefully with this car being in pretty good shape we will be able to see some progress faster than normal.
Pulled the rest of the carpet out this morning. The passenger side floor pan has a couple of bad spots. I think the rest just needs cleaning and treating.
Some blasting or grinding should show you what you have to work with. May only need some patches here and there. Although, when in doubt I say cut the whole floor pan out and get some fresh metal in there.
Got to do a little work on the car today. This is the passenger side floor pan. I have determined that this rust is from a leaking windshield as the cowl looks to be in good shape.
As a side note, I have been looking for a 289 engine coded close to the build date. 65Les has one in Michigan. Who's traveling from Michigan to the Gulf Coast? >irate:
That is going to be one nice car when done. All things considered I would still want to take off the top cowl panel to fix/clean and seal the lower cowl. Although it may not be leaking much, I suspect its like all the rest of these cars, in need of some form of fixing. Now is the time to do it! Are you keeping the original color combo?
Thanks geicoman58. I'm sure I will "visit" the cowl once I have the floors completed. I have the car in my warehouse (8750 sq. ft) so no worries about rain. To be honest, I doubt I will ever drive it in the rain. I really have not made up my mind on the color combination. I lean towards keeping these cars as original as possible, but my wife fell in love with a Mustang on CJ's website. Will have to make that determination later I guess...
Also decided to just order new calipers and rotors today. I'm getting those from Dan and Carol at Chockostang!
In an above post I cleaned up the calipers I had, but I ordered the wrong seal kits. Put some thought into to this and just decided I might as well install all new, it is the brakes after all. :surprise:
Got away for a little bit today to work on the tail light panel. Dis-assembled to see what the damage is. I am pleasantly surprised by the passenger side as I thought it would be more "beat up". irate:
I have never replaced a tail light panel, so think I'll do a bit of research before taking it off...
Not what I had planned to do today but got started and decided to keep going until it was removed. The bottom of the tail light panel was the worst part to me (also the last). I basically had to grind most of the spot welds along the bottom instead of drilling them out. I will clean up the rear end before installing a new panel. Found a NOS panel but it's pricey...:frown2:
Glad i made a productive day out of this...:grin2:
Got the parts in from Chockostang (Thanks Dan and Carol!).
Unfortunately, I got started and a client came by the office and stayed a while. Always like talking to my clients and the parts will still be there tomorrow.
I did snap a picture of the driver's side rotor installed...:smile2:
Got both rotors and calipers on. I had to run this morning and get the correct hoses (the car had 7/16" hoses instead of 3/8"). Luckily there is a Scott Drake dealer about 1.5 hours from me.
Also grabbed a radiator (3 core) while i was there as the car had a 2 core put in just to say it had one (I think :wink.
Goal on this particular car at this point is to :
A. Make sure it stops! >
B. Make sure it goes! irate:
C. Make sure all the sheet metal is good and/or replaced.
D. Then worry about cosmetics...
Also set the tail light panel in place to see just how well it would "fit". Glad that I ask on the VMF about NOS and Original Ford Tooling. I was about to spend about $200 bucks more than I needed to it appears...:yoho:
Didn't get a response on the VMF (before this posting anyway) about the floor cross member being straight on a '66. I feel pretty comfortable that it is supposed to be. So I straightened it out and cleaned it up and sprayed with weld-thru primer. Looks like the fit is good. :smile2:
Not finished by any means but got some spot welds holding it together. Once i finish with the spot welds, I will go back and do a few plug welds just for good measure.
Brian, see picture 2 in post #17. The plan is to plug weld from the back side in the holes drilled in the cross member. I know that is a tight place to weld, but that's the plan nonetheless. irate:
I also noticed on the VMF the one response to my question was that the bumper and tail light panel is curved. I didn't think it was...I will ask for more responses on that.
Ok. After further review, it appears that the rear end is curved. Hopefully it can be seen in the picture I posted. "Little" things like this are obviously hard to "know" when repairing a vehicle with damage. That's the beauty of this forum!
Decided to work on the passenger side floor pan. Got it shaped up fairly good. I did have to bend the lip upwards on the short pan (I think they make the lip bent down on all of the short pans so you can use them on convertibles and coupe/fastbacks). I will cut the piece off up at the firewall so that it will be like the factory pan. I do have to weld some on the firewall where the pans overlap each other, so need to get that cut out next.
Got the firewall piece fitted and welded into place. The short pan still has a good fit to it after the welding. I will drill holes for the spot welds before securing it in place. Not sure if I'll get to do any work this week so it may be next weekend before anything else moves forward...:crying:
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