Saturday, November 24, 2018

I'm trying my hardest to not act how I feel

I received the carpet kit from Germany today - the rear seat kick panel was the first piece I fit and, while not perfect, it's decent.
I was warned about this front piece not being the correct shape - not ideal but not the end of the world, really.
I centered the heater vent on the body and then followed the piece back to see how it'd navigate the seat track and end at the rear seat kick panel.

The heat vent grommet bit fits great from that point forward.
 Moving toward the rear of the car - the carpet starts to show some issues.  There's an awkward joining of pieces where the front of the seat track is on the rocker - it's cut too 'early' so there's a gap between where the cut is on the carpet and the 'beginning' of the seat track...
...which also means that it's off centered with the seat track and fouls the 'end' of the seat track.

There's not a whole lot I can do to shift the location of this cut to the rear without recreating the entire piece.
The toughest part is that the length is too short overall.  This is consistent on both sides of the car, unfortunately, and cannot be fixed without being replaced.

The center piece is almost long enough...too bad it's not a hand grenade.
This inner seat track cut is done nicely and it seems to fit properly.
Another angle of the seat track cut where it meets the second half of carpet.  The two pieces of carpet have a very small overlap and I suspect that they will not stay where they belong over time.
The tunnel carpet at the front, however, is way too large and pops up by a good 1-2" over the tunnel.  I originally thought that the yet to be installed insulation would take up some of that - but then realized that it's not going to take up enough of it to bring this back down to a normal level.

This could, should I choose, be corrected by removing material from the outer edges of this piece.  It won't fix the other issues that crop up in this carpet kit though.

I knew that there were a couple of issues with the carpet kit but they seemed to be rather minor in scale.  If the kit were too 'big', I could have that fixed - but I can't do anything about carpet that's cut too short and off - center.

I think I should have kept the money in my pocket and had carpet fitted to the car once it was done.  Yet another place where I tried to be proactive and get a limited run of a part that simply doesn't fit and will require a lot of work (and more money) to get it right.

Spending money on this car continues to prove to be a bad idea...

Monday, November 12, 2018

You cannot make progress without making decisions

Nigel is turned sideways and pushed to the back of the garage so that we can fit at least one of the two 'regular' cars in the garage.  In addition to all of the random stuff in the picture - a snowblower has been added to the garage inventory and floor space has rapidly vanished.  In order to fix the poor workmanship from Randy - I'll have to remove the pan from the body and set it up on sawhorses or jack stands and I just don't have room for that with one of the 'daily drivers' in the garage.
For a short time, I debated dropping the pan at RediStrip and having it dipped - but I can clean away the botched sections of the pan - fix the welding, install the correct parts, clean, strip and paint them to match the rest well enough to get the job done without the added work of repainting the entire pan.  The interior side of the pan will be mostly covered up by insulation so I'm not as concerned with perfection there - just that the two halves of the kick panel match - unnecessary holes are welded shut and the dents are removed where possible.  There are a few other welds that need to be cleaned up and then it should be ready for paint touch up.  I'll likely address the issues with the subframe at that time as well since it's easier to paint things in batches.

I borrowed a wheel adapter from Jim and dropped all ten wheels off at the local Midas - they said they could do a quick wheel spin to determine which wheels were bent and which are straight.  I was quoted a time of about 2 hours to do the job.  After 24 hours of no contact by them, I went to the shop to discover that they were done and claim that only one of the 10 wheels is straight.  They damaged the wheel adapter so when I returned it to Jim - we discussed it and after trying to determine a value, we agreed that I'd pay him $50 to replace it.  So, it cost me nearly $100 to check ten wheels for straightness - and I bet that they didn't even check them all so I'll have to do it again.  I wrote them a nice one star review on Google for their shit effort.

Now that I'm back to the working world - this project is now on hiatus until Spring.  There will be a few updates as they happen (or if they happen) - otherwise, it's going to be quiet here for a while.