Spring cleaning

Seeing as the Zook is outside and I have a tendency to get very cranky when cold and wet I decided to work on the inside of the 410 today (it’s raining). The first task was to give her a good cleaning as the entire floor was covered in 1″ thick hard mud! After a bit of experimentation I worked out that a hammer and chisel were the best way to loosen this gunk and spent an entertaining few hours crawling around in the car, getting shards of glass stuck in my knees and walloping everything within striking distance with a lump hammer.

Next came the trusty vacuum; it took 3 completely full vacuum bags, but eventually I managed to clear enough of the mud off the floor to reveal a surprisingly sound firewall and floor plate! There are some spots of surface rust that will need grinding and quite a bit of metal around the wheel arches will need to be cut back to clean metal before being welded up, but on the whole I’m extremely pleased with how little work needs to be done on removing the dreaded rust monster.

The next task was to rip out everything that was bolted down. The door panels went first and were closely followed by the drivers seat after being very liberal with the WD40. The passengers seat gave me quite a hard time but eventually succumbed to a combination of the trusy lump hammer, a crow-bar and an angle grinder. Turned out that whoever had mounted the seats hadn’t used the correct thread on their bolts, so once the seats were out I retapped all the seat mounting holes so that we don’t have a similar problem when putting in some decent new seats.

I fitted the spare rear side window in the gaping hole behind the passenger , so the only remaining gap for rain to get in is now the missing rear window, which we’ll fill with a  piece of polycarbonate this week sometime.

I also found enough spare time to dismantle the dashboard and start working out the mess of wires that all seem to terminate in loose ends. There’s been quite a lot of home wiring done on the loom, but my initial impression is that no serious bodging has taken place so everything should be pretty simple to fix.