The summer is soon over

After the minor spring service I drove the Mustang as often as possible during the summer. My intention was to use it as a daily driver and that’s what I did. Whenever the weather was sunny or at least not rainy I chose to drive it instead of my family wagon. Convertible appeared to raise interest among the other travellers and pedestrians. If not on every other traffic light but at the latest on the third someone would comment what a nice car I have. I started counting traffic lights while driving. It also showed up to be very practical to go shopping with top down. The bags are easy to load on the rear seat without having to use keys or open doors.

 

I mostly drove short distances near home, but made one longer trip with my wife to spend a weekend in a city located about 160 km from us. On the bending country roads the car was at it’s best, driven with speed of 45-50 mph ( 60 mph is the absolute maximum for top-down driving and to avoid “waving” of the unibody) . During this trip I met the only technical problem when the retaining spring in the right-hand drum brake broke down. During the four months of summer Mustang gathered 2200 miles in her odometer (which by the way is as much as the average for the previous 43 summers) It’s fuel economy was good. Gasoline consumption was moderate, only 11,5 litres per 100 kilometres.
But soon it was August 31st and I had to decide whether to have the car inspected or to start the restoration. After reviewing the floor pans I decided to unscrew the plates…

I had thought that replacing the floor pans could be done without having to tear the whole car down. But I soon discovered that floor pans were not the only parts to be repaired. The parts of the unibody structure like inner rockers were shot or at least “creatively” repaired. You can not replace inner rockers without touching the torque boxes. If you fix the torque boxes, you’ll most probably need to fix frame rails as well. If you remove all of these parts at one time you’ll get two convertibles, the front and the rear. Therefore there must be supporting structure installed before removing the rotten parts. Anyhow a lot of cutting, welding and grinding was to be done before the floor pans would be replaced.

I googled the internet and found a couple of blogs with helpful information (thanks Kev and Alex). Their pictures and stories encouraged me to do this by myself. I dismounted the interior in order to clearly see what was lying under the carpet. And this is what I found.

 

The rusted out floor has been patched with light alloy plates riveted to the remainders of the floor.

 Under the plates you can see that the original rear foot well is partly vanished, the rear torque box is rotten through. The shiny plate has been spot-welded from here and there by the swede, I guess. The floor pan under the rear seat is so rusted that parking brake cable is visible.

The driver side rear torque box. Note the thick metal which has been used to patch the inner rocker in lower right corner of the picture. If there is a missing piece of railway track somewhere in Massachusetts, don't blame it on me. Someone else welded it in my car. The thickness of the metal in next to nothing if it is welded to a rusted out part.

It was time to disassemble the rest of the car...