Week #17 & #18

All,

Week #17 was spent movin' the mom-n-law into our house. :( It is just temporary as she will be living in a garage apartment connected to our new
house which will start construction in January. Between Jan 15 and closing she will live with relatives in Germany. Indirect Mopar content?... she is paying for the apartment.... and my new garage!

Anyway, no work done that week in the shop aside from replacing the old stereo out there with an even older one...this one includes an 8-track recorder!

Week #18 is a different story. Got back on the trunk floor to find where the extra .25" was gonna come from in order to get the proper alignment of the stiffening creases and center splice. Some trimming of the rear "shelf" that the back edge of the floor sits on got me what I needed at the rear, but the front edge could only be corrected by re-bending the lip that abuts the wheelhouse to allow for the .25" movement. It wasn't pretty but this seam will be coated with sealer and will not be visible.

Speaking of sealer... have you stopped to consider just how much of that stuff they used at the seams in the trunk? I've pulled out globs the size of baseballs before. When it comes to replacing it the tendency is to cut the tip of the tube of filler to leave a .5" hole or so, and carefully
running a bead down in the seam, trying to be as neat as you can. Seems to me to be accurate you would just rip the plastic snout off the sealer tube, empty half the tube at your starting point and proceed with a 1.5" bead until you use up the tube, about 10" later, following it up by "smoothing" it out with a spreader that has 2 or 3 "character" notches cut out in it. Just how much sealer would be required to do the job correctly?

Back to it... I got the fit I wanted and with the panels in place I secured them with a couple of those "Cleco"(?) things. I know screws are cheaper but with taking the panels in and out as often as is required to do the job, the Cleco things work great. With the floors in place I crawled under the car and with a marker outlined the frame rails and all other "brackets" that the floor will be "spot welded" to. With that done I put the floor halves on the sawhorses and put a dot, within the markings, where I wanted each weld to go. I spaced them about 3 or 4" apart and referred back to the cars frame rails for the portions of the supports that would get welds. After that was the task of drilling the hole for the spot welds... 112 .25" holes. That doesn't include requirement for welding along the front and back edge or to the wheelhouses or extensions! After that the only thing left was the large diameter holes. With the hole saws I bought 2 weeks ago, they went smoothly. Smoothed all edges around all the holes and those floors are ready for installation!!!

With the day still young I started planning the replacement of the rear panel area that has the attachment holes for the P-L-Y-M-O-U-T-H letters.
As mentioned before, these holes had been filled and in the process that area of the panel had been warped. With a perfect replacement trimmed to the size I was comfortable with, I held it tight against the car and scribed a line around it to mark the area to be cut out. I was a bit nervous about this cut... this was a large visible area and my experience is limited. But, remembering those immortal words of Tom Cruise in Risky
Business, "sometimes you just gotta say... what the frick." I was careful to stay within the line and all went well. I will say that the chore of fitting
the replacement in the hole left and tacking it in place was a very long and tedious chore. I was spent after that... and that's where I left things.