Dave W 1971/240Z rebuild

[davewormald]

14 minutes ago, Namerow said:

1. Can you talk a bit a bout your 'chipping' technique.  Did you use dry ice, for example?
2. What's your approach for drilling out spot welds and peeling the layers part?
3. Is that a corn cob that came out of the air vent?

I can only address number 3, and only speculatively. It sure looks like a corn cob. We seem to be raising corn-fed mice or rats! The house I lived in when I first bought this car was on a lot cut out of a corn field. I moved out of that house in 1996. I'm wondering if it goes that far back! It's more likely that they pulled the cob out of the nearby garbage can in the garage and took it back to their "dining room".

I did drop in on Chris the other day when he was enjoying some quality time with removal of the tar mat. No dry ice was evident, but he did comment that recent cool mornings made the mat more brittle and easier to remove.

[grannyknot]

I did use dry ice once and it worked okay, the closest place to me that sells dry ice is about an hour away so I end up doing it by hand. If it is like -10C in the shop early in the morning I take a hammer to the tar mat and breaks up almost as well as the dry ice.  My 2 best chipping tools are a gasket scrapper and a carpenters pry bar, also, a hammer.  

I've gone through a few different spot weld tools and the best one so far is this kit from Eastwoods, it works best when you pre drill the centre of the spot weld with a 1/16" or 1/8" drill.  You push hard with a hand held drill and as soon as you see a little puff brown rust you know you are through the first layer of metal, that's where you stop or you will cut a hole in the backing plate.

Splitting, the seam I mostly do with and old wood chisel, it's easier to control, if I'm not making any headway I pull out the air chisel, it's a great tool but you can cut through the good metal you want to keep really fast.

If neither the hand chisel or air chisel  are working then the air saw is the best way to go. As good as these tools are, drilling out spot welds is a hard, dirty tedious job, almost as bad as chipping out tar mat😄

Yes, that's a corn cob, cattle corn, feed corn.

 

[grannyknot]

I started digging into the rust this week,

j

[Patcon]

That's good progress!

[jfa.series1]

Whenever I see pics like these and others far worse I am reminded of how fortunate I've been to have a salt-free, garage-kept car all these years. The only rust on my car was some surface rust on the interior floor courtesy of the dealer-installed A/C unit. I am in awe of the skills and knowledge I see in making repairs like this.

[davewormald]

If I'd seen all this when I first started looking at the car a few years ago, I doubt I would have moved ahead with it. So I'm really glad I didn't look too hard! It would be interesting to know what state it was in when it was moved from Georgia to Ontario back in 1994. Five Toronto winters, followed by 20 years in a garage (even a dry one) probably accelerated dramatically anything that had started in the south.

[grannyknot]

The passenger side dogleg didn't look too bad from the outside, but once I got inside it proved to be just as bad as the D/S.

Some of the KFV panels fit like a glove, here's the original rear seat mount placed on the new pan.

But here on the slam panel support, it fits like an OJ Simpson glove, that 1/4" gap shouldn't be there, will have to do some nip/tuck.

 

[Namerow]

On 11/26/2023 at 7:35 AM, grannyknot said:

I started digging into the rust this week,

j

Nice set of photos, illustrating the logic of your metal-removal process.  Too bad that one of the most complicated zones of the monocoque structure also happens to be the biggest rust pit.

[Patcon]

1 hour ago, Namerow said:

Nice set of photos, illustrating the logic of your metal-removal process.  Too bad that one of the most complicated zones of the monocoque structure also happens to be the biggest rust pit.

Yes, and I believe it is because of the multilayer complexity. Lots of surface area and low on the car. All those layers get wet but can't get dry and it's not galvanized. A modern chassis dip would probably help alot.

[grannyknot]

8 hours ago, Patcon said:

Yes, and I believe it is because of the multilayer complexity. Lots of surface area and low on the car. All those layers get wet but can't get dry and it's not galvanized. A modern chassis dip would probably help alot.

Yeah, it's all bare metal in the rocker and dogleg, not even primer was applied, but then the design team were probably thinking the cars would have maybe a 10-15 yr lifespan.

[grannyknot]

I was hoping I could leave the front seat mounts in place and install the floor pan from underneath, I've done before with Charlie's pans, (Zedd Findings) but KFV's pans are such a tight fit that I had to remove it. Which is not a bad thing, they are showing some rust on the bottoms, now I can throw all 4 seat mounts into a 5 gal bucket of citric acid and clean them properly.  I'll be working on one side at a time so as to ensure alignment doesn't go wonky.

 

[grannyknot]

I test fitted the floor pan and toe board yesterday, then cut the transmission side and welded in today.  I still have to fill in the welds and grind more but it's good enough for now.

This is an air tool I don't get to use very often but sure saves lots of the labour of drilling holes, I paid $40 yrs ago at a pawn shop. A hole punch on one side and a flanger on the other.