Sunday 19 January 2014

FHC resto nr. 2; Stripping interior

Went over to the car yesterday afternoon again. This time the target was stripping the interior. Started with removing the seats and the doors to create a bit of room to work. Found out that the driver's door is in very good condition. But the passenger door is (for me) beyond economical repair. It has been repaired in the past and that hasn't been done very well. And there's rust everywhere. And with a few better ones in the shed, this one will go to the skip ...


After creating the space to manoeuvre, I worked my way from the back to the front of the interior. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of tin worm in the area behind the seats that is visible ...



But it was amazing to see how the previous owner has neglected sealing the body from the elements. The flaps behind the rear quarter grills were missing and there are fairly large gaps and no sealant at the four corners of the rear deck. This is probably from when he replaced it with an incorrect one from a later car. Looks like the car wasn't intended to be driven in the rain ...


With the rear end bare it was time to switch my attention to the front of the interior, and that revealed some nasty surprises. The passenger foot-well is in reasonable condition although I do expect some more rot hidden behind the sound proofing ...


But the driver's side is worse hit by the tin worm. And it looks like the previous owner found out that clutch slave cylinder was rather inaccessible with the Sprint gearbox, so he cut a rather big hole in the transmission tunnel ...




Left me with the last job for the afternoon, removing the dashboard. After removing the vacuum/economy gauge  the PO had screwed to the left-hand side of the dashboard, it turned out there were only two small holes there so this dash can be reused as its overall condition is pretty good. Which meant I had to be careful with removing the (rather wedge like) cover for the extra gauges on top of the dashboard. I think the PO watched to many Leyland adverts on the TR7 😜


Sadly though the mounting screws for this contraption were rather inaccessible, it took me almost an hour to get it out without damage to the dashboard. Luckily the screw holes will be hidden by the original cover. Time to call it a day and head for home ...


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