It’s six months since I last worked on the ’76 car. And as you can read in my blog, there are several reasons for this: ‘t Kreng's water pump, the work on the DHC, and my regular work of course. But with a few weeks holiday ahead of me I decided it would be nice if I could finish the rear of the car’s interior. Time to pull the cover of the car and start to work. But first there were a few (small) jobs that needed rectifying. Starting with the mounting hardware for the brake balance pressure reducing valve. While fitting the steering column I found out I had used the wrong bolt to fit the valve. It was the bolt for the column’s G-clamp, which is longer than the one for the valve. As I had prepared only one bolt of the correct length it was taken from the valve and used on the steering column. But that meant I needed to prepare new fasteners for the valve. Luckily I had a few rusty spares lying around. And with the help of a friend’s blasting cabinet, a blow torch and a small container filled with oil, it was blackened and fitted. Looks quite nice.
Next job that needed rectifying were four small holes in the cabin floor. These needed their rubber plugs fitted. Something I forgot when I fitted the sound deadening pads almost 10 years ago. First Idea was to just open up the holes and insert the blanking plugs. But that didn’t work. The combination of the steel panel, the underbody protection and the sound deadening pads was too thick to fit the blanking plugs. Time to borrow a professional (and very sharp) hollow punch set from a friend to remove the sound deadening pads around the holes. These punches are designed to cut through material when hit with a (big) hammer. Not a good idea on steel panels. But being very sharp punches, they could cut through the sound deadening by simply pushing and turning them through the sound deadening pads. This way a ring was cut loose from the sound deadening pads. And this remaining ring could then be removed quite easily using a pen knife and a small sharp screw driver. And this removed enough material for the blanking plugs to be fitted. Some clear wax oil was used for rust protection.
The last correction concerned the carpet over the transmission tunnel. When I fitted it over the 2024 Christmas period, I wasn’t impressed in the way the carpet ballooned coming down from the top of the transmission tunnel. So I decided to use some fancy high strength “gecko” tape to glue the carpet to the top and the sides of the transmission tunnel. And this worked very well. And it enabled me to perforate the carpet to fit the plastic carpet protector and the mounting bolts for the seats.
The last tasks for this productive afternoon were the preparations for mounting the parcel shelf. A job I've been putting off for a while now, because I'm afraid I'll make a mistake with the dimensions for the holes I need to drill. Measure three times, drill once! The fact that the guy who covered the parcel shelf has died since he delivered this quite nice job, didn’t help! Also checked and corrected the sound deadening panel I made and which fits between the parcel shelf and the rear window. More on that later!
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