Time to really dig into the Z body and find out what is going on. Starting with recollections of hell from the Imperial – removing undercoating.
Dig out the heat gun. The arm I used to hold the heat gun on the Imperial is too low. Look through my junk pile, find appropriate pieces, and weld up a tall heat gun holder. Easy job, only took about half an hour.
Get set up under the 280Z. Point the heat gun at a section of undercoating, let it run for about 30 seconds to a minute, point the gun to a new area, and scrape off the undercoating from the hot area. Repeat. Over and over and over again. The biggest difference is that I’m sitting on a stool under the Z where I was laying on my back under the Imperial. Slow, tedious, mind-numbing, nasty, dirty, and messy.
Of course, this isn’t the asphaltic undercoating used on the Imperial, so it is even more difficult to scrape off and makes an even bigger mess. Sigh…
Eventually the undercoating was gone from the drivers side floor patch. Hmm, looks like I was wrong – the patch was secured with self-tapping screws, not pop rivets. No real difference.
Krud. They didn’t use replacement floor panels – just pieces of sheet metal. And they put patches on both the top and bottom of the floor. The clown show that keeps on giving…
Continuing with the heat gun discover that the patches extend from the floor into the firewall. Looks like I’m going to have to replace at least the lower part of the firewall. Also looks like the front of the rocker and sill need to be replaced.
I finally discovered some welding. Some really, really bad welding. The frame rails extend in front of the firewall and support a front suspension mounting point as well as the engine cradle. The new frame rail had been fitted over the old frame rail and “welded” in place. With classic bird poop welds with little penetration and little strength. At least this will be easy to remove…
There are some other areas that look suspicious. The battery box is notorious for damage to the inner fender well and firewall from leaking batteries. These areas look fine at first glance, but have suspicious signs under closer inspection – especially the brace under the battery box. I won’t be able to tell for sure until I get the fender off and take a really close look.
Speaking of which, I won’t know what shape the rocker panels, sill panels, and door frame are in until I strip the paint and bondo off of the rockers. The rocker panels clearly have large amounts of bondo. And it isn’t as well finished as other parts of the car. There should be visible seams at the front of the rocker where the front fender mounts and the rear of the rocker where the dogleg at the back of the door fits. No seams; continuous stretch of bondo. For some reason I’m not expecting a pleasing discovery here..
As for the fender itself, it looks like there was rot in the lower fender behind the wheel. No surprise – almost every car gets rust here. There is a patch panel here – just stuck over the bottom of the fender. The proper approach is to cut out the rust and butt weld in new metal. I won’t even know if I can use the existing patch panels until I get this area stripped down to bare metal.
The rear quarter panels have been worked on. I can see some expanding spray foam, so it looks like the rear wheel arch and rear deck floor will need some work.
It is clear that the car is not what I thought it was. I can’t tell for sure if the previous “restoration” was merely incompetent or if someone put lipstick on a pig to flip it. With these repairs the car looked solid until you got it up on a lift and examined it closely.
I have my suspicions, but it doesn’t really matter. The car is mine now. I believe I have the skills to fix it properly – looks like we are going to find out!