No Floor Pan Yet

I spent the morning getting a bit more fitting done on the front half of the floor pan; I'm pretty much sure I'm ready to get everything welded in. After finishing all the fitting, I did a bit more cleanup of the sills/flanges that the floor pan sits on, and I repaired the front inner section of the frame area up in the toeboard area, a simple repair I've been meaning to do for weeks but kept putting off. Then I made sure the inside of the tunnel was nice and clean, and sprayed it with a good coat of cold galvanizing paint (zinc spray paint).

Then I hesitated. Should I start welding in the pan today? What if there were things that I should do inside the tunnel now, while the floor was off, and access was easy? Should I re-run the accelerator rod and other cables? I decided that the accelerator rod was a definite must-do, and I got it down from the parts shelf. Trying to remember which hole it fed into in the back, I quickly remembered that the rubber "buffers" on the little metal brackets it slides through inside the tunnel had long since gotten hard and disintegrated, and had mostly fallen apart upon removal. I made some new buffers out of several layers of duct-tape so that there was no metal-to-metal rubbing and contact between the body and the rod. I then greased them up.

After inserting the rod, I found that there was definite resistance between the rod and the guide areas inside the tunnel it slides through, even with grease. Also, I wasn't so sure about my replacement buffers for the rod. I decided to quit working on the floor pan for the day, ask some questions of the list, and then work on it again tomorrow or Friday. Instead, I worked on other little things for the rest of my free time, like sand-blasting the rear swing plates and torsion bar covers, installing a neato new two-stage safety coupler on my air line, cleaning up the work area, etc. You know, sort of secondary stuff that you keep putting off doing while you are working on the major project.

I'm really excited about getting the floor in, because this is going to be the first time since I've owned the car that the floor doesn't have any holes in it, but I want to do it right. Better safe than sorry.