After attending the funeral of a friend this morning I found myself with a couple of hours free this afternoon so I decided to try to crack on with getting the offside kick plate sorted.
After a couple of hours of hitting things with hammers and swearing at it we had the kick plate in place. Once I got the bolts in I was able to pull the kink out at least. They'll both want to be stripped and painted but that's a job for another day. Will be a hammered black finish we'll go with to match some of the other details in the cabin.
Then the seal was reattached. These will be changed for tubular section seals at some point as I reckon they will work far better.
This was the last part of this project which involved stuff being apart so I was able to remove all the tools and nonsense from in the car and put things back together again. Longest job there was finding the seatbelt which I had helpfully hung over a hook on the garage wall...right in front of my blind face. Took me half an hour to spot it. Idiot.
From the previous round of work I noticed that the side "cheek" behind the windscreen washer bottle clearly had lifted while the adhesive was curing before (lack of patience on my part likely to blame as it was the last bit I fitted). So this was peeled back re-glued and was left with a screwdriver wedged behind the washer bottle for half an hour or so to keep it sitting flush. Sorted.
While I'm calling this job fundamentally done there are a couple of bits which will want a little further attention.
[] Parcel shelf. I'm 1/3 of a time short of having enough left to cover that. This is probably the most important one as it's where about 80% of the mechanical noise in the cabin gets in. I'm probably going to put some actual Dynamat or similar on there as well for that reason.
[] Door cavities. To match the visual aspect of the rectangular cutout at the base, and to help cut down drumming from these pretty large flat panels.
[] I may also do the windscreen pillars as the black semi gloss paint on there is *really* bad for reflections when the sun is even vaguely low. Plus the metal is quite pitted in a few areas so it would look tidier.
[] Sun visor panel. This was originally fabric lined from the factory, I stripped and painted it because the original material was decomposing, but it would feel appropriate to return it to a soft finish. Especially as the roof will be done somewhere down the line.
Lining the roof itself is what I'm terming "phase 2" of this project. That's something I will probably tackle next year. I'll use a lighter coloured material for that, and will probably go for actual automotive trim to maximise audio absorption, minimise weight and get something that's easier to work with. I'll also remove the roof from the car to make access far easier. Being able to flip the whole moulding upside down will make the job massively easier I think.
I only had time for a quick test run round the block today. Initial impressions though are that the apparent noise levels in the cabin even from the work done so far are vastly reduced. You can actually best wind noise above 40 now which was never the case before, so it's definitely helped! The panel being more firmly fastened down has helped improve the feeling of solidity too as it's not rumbling and vibrating under your feet half as much. Hoping I might be able to get a proper test drive in tomorrow.
It has definitely highlighted that I need to make a sealing boot/plug for the cable passthrough in the rear bulkhead where the overhead control box cables to through as you can clearly hear a lot of mechanical noise is coming through there now that a lot of the other avenues have been cut off. The overall job was to improve the interior though and it feels like we've definitely achieved that aim.
When I first started the car up it became apparent that the carb was lacking a working idle circuit again, presumably due to a bit of grime finding its way into the (tiny) idle jet. This cleared after a few minutes of running thankfully...but the reason it happened quickly became apparent.
If you look closely you can see the metal cap over the end of the filter element in the fuel filter has broken away. I'm really getting hacked off with how hard it's getting to find decent quality consumables these days. Think I'll see about getting some filters from a marine specialist as I did with the fuel lines, being a more safety conscious field hopefully the quality control will be better...
If you want to do some more carpeting I have a whole house that needs doing 
