Sorting the interior out - stripping out sound proofing & a repaint.

Well its been a while since ive updated the blog - 2 months to be exact. And thats not because ive been lazy its been purely because ive had very little time to get into the garage due to work & family commitments. I did manage 4 hours one Saturday and a couple of odd hours here & there, but not really had the time I needed to make some decent progress.

However, I did manage to make some good progress on the interior. Id already stripped all the stock interior out way back about 10 years ago, but there was still a lot to do. Firstly I had to chip out all the bitumen slabs which makers seem to glue on the floorpan in the car. Theres no end of it. All in the boot floor, and 3 separate slabs under the seats. The best way I found to do this was just a screwdriver & a hammer. Most of it chipped off cleanly. Some bits were a nightmare though, especially around the gearshift tunnel, so for this I used a blow torch and a wall paper stripper tool.

  

 Above you can see the car as im nearly finished. The black squares are where bitumen came off leaving the black original shell paint. I also stripped out the remaining red carpet and tons of foam soundproofing from behind the dash.

Once done I painted the whole inteior with some rustoleum grey paint. Its pretty good stuff. I opted for grey as I thought white would be a bit too reflective and highlight any imperfections. Black would be too dark. So grey is a good halfway house.

 The grey actually turned out lighter than it looked on the tin which was an added bonus. I painted all the cage and rear strut brace also. The grey actually seemed to blend in nicely with the rest of the remaining original inteior like the door panels. Ive not decided yet if to keep them or replace with something else.

I then drilled all the mounting holes through the re-enforcement plates id welded to where the cage bolts using 12mm drill bit, and used some brand new high tensile m12 bolts to bolt it all into place. Screwfix turned out the cheapest place for the bolts. Fitting the actual cage wasnt too bad. The rear half bolted straight in nicely. My cage also bolts to the top seatbelt fixing points which were a bit tight, so i had to hammer the floorpan slightly down to give clearance. The front cage and the doorbars fitted fine, but I did have problems with the top parts of the cage which connect front to back. They needed some "adjustment" with a lump hammer and pry bar before it all lined up. Still, its all done now.. and wont be coming out again in a hurry.

I also now need to workout how to bolt in my seats. Ive a pair of old Cobra Monaco bucket seats in blue (one here pictured lying down in back of car, hence the rollbars looking strange). I can either buy some universal subframes and try to get them positioned correctly, or just weld some cross members/angle iron/boxing across the floor pan and bolt them to that. Either way it might take some experimenting to get the positioning right. Im also now wondering if these seats are a bit too tatty for the car. They come complete with lots of fag burns and marks from the old owners. Will have to have a think...