After ripping out all of the larger items from the Mustang's interior I was finally able to pull the car's under britches off now. The carpet was cleared away for removal, minus the seat belts. In order to pull the seat belts off I had to pull one large bolt off per seat belt. While this sounds pretty easy, we must remember, this is a 65 Rustang. Everything in this car was rusted all to hell, including the bolts. I was able to pull one bolt off with some effort and a large breaker bar but the other one ended up stripping. Because of this, the angle grinder had to come out. Of course the angle grinder ended up making fast work of the bolt head so with that the seat belts were out and the carpet was ready to come out. To help make things easier on me when it comes to removing and disposing of the old carpet, I took the time to cut the carpet in spots where necessary to pull the carpet out in pieces. Now because of how the seat platforms are situated, the front half of the carpet from the seat platform forward was rotted and able to pull loose from the rest of the carpet. I used my box cutter to further cut the carpet into small enough sections that I was able to fold up the pieces and stuff them into a feed sack so I can be better able to throw the stuff onto the burn pile without having this unwieldy old carpet laying across the top of a pile of brush. After a bunch of cuts and pieces folded up and stuffed, I managed to get the entire carpet removed, including the base layer that went under the carpet. Of course I didn't completely get rid of all the rat shit as it spilled out over the floor as I pulled carpet out. That's ok, I'll end up vacuuming up all that later. Of course after removing the carpet it fully revealed just what we're dealing with here. The floor was in no lesser terms, fucked. The floor was rotted all around in various spots, falling in at some corners, and separating where the floor was patched in the past. When it comes time to actually do the structural and body work prior to mounting the body on the truck frame, the entire floor will need to be replaced. At least whole floors can be purchased for a reasonable price so its no big deal when I do have to replace this. Also, I won't cut out the floor until the time actually comes to do the work and replace the panel. If I chop out the old floor, I may not have an accurate guide as to where to weld up the new floor. Keeping the old rotted floor in will help me mark out the floor lines so I can get the replacement floor panel welded in as accurate as possible. With the floor taken care of the next thing was the headliner. Of course the material was rotted enough that I was able to tear off the material from the roof. The ribs of the headliner were exposed easily after tearing away the material. Just like with the carpet all these pieces were stuffed into a feed sack to be tossed on the burn pile. As for the ribs there were only three of them to be removed. The ribs are flexible enough that I was able to manipulate down and out from the roof to get each unit unhooked from their mounting points along the left and right sides of the roof structure. These ribs, like the other parts of the car to be saved went up to the garage to be stored on the shelves to be reused later when the car is being rebuilt. The next order of business in the stripping of the interior will be removing the side panels in the back seat area. There's the lower panels that had the arm rest surface and side interior lights then there's the vent panels at the top. The actual vent mechanisms won't be removed but the exterior panel that covers these mechanisms will be removed. I may end up still having to remove those vent assemblies if in replacing the rear quarters I end up having to do a complete cut out of the rear quarter from the rear glass and roof seams down to the rocker panels, in much the same was as I had to do on the Dodge many years back. From what I can see the upper quarters are still in good shape so the most I would have to do is cut the panel from the fold in the metal where it goes from horizontal to vertical as the panel folds downwards towards the rocker panels. This will just be a matter of carefully cutting right on that seam then tack welding spots along the joint between the old upper panel and the new replacement panel so as to not warp the sheet metal. The welding would continue in increments until the whole seam is done then it would be covered either with body filler or maybe with lead filler to make a more permanent patch that wouldn't just decay in time with moisture. We'll see how we're going to do this work, that's still a ways down the road.
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