Giulia TI floors
Right now, the Achille’s heel of the TI is the rust. The Flintstone effect is funny for a minute, but eventually seeing the road whiz by just inches from your toes — while not on a motorcycle — just leads to aggravation and a nagging feeling that the whole car is disintegrating beneath you. Because I have a long list of body-work projects in front of me, I figured I could spend some time learning the process by fixing the TI floors myself. It’s a win-win, since the repair can will be ugly but the net result positive. And maybe the repair won’t be *that* ugly.
I’m fortunate that my good friend Luigi has a lot of experience welding (and, coincidentally or not, also has a ratty old TI). He has loaned me his MIG welder, a big heavy vice, and a bunch of other very important welding peripherals, including an auto-darkening welding helmet. As for me, I bought a 4.5″ grinder, a sawzall, tin snips, gloves, a peen hammer, and a few other odds and ends. Body work requires a lot of accessorizing.
So here’s the before shot, after I’d taken out the seat and pulled away some of the plastic. By the way, the seat removal is not hard but not obvious either: you remove the outer bolts from under the car, and then slide the seat forward until it comes free from the center rail.
TI floor panel. It's hard to see here but there's a softball-sized hole at the front right.
And the rear:
TI floor rear. A tiny hole is just visible behind the central seat belt mount.
My first order of business was to strip this mess down to metal and see what was really going on. I should have expected it, but of course the rust was worse than even these photos show. There must be a rule of thumb, like for each visible square inch of rusted out metal, multiply by x. In my case, x is about 10.
The front, after an hour of clean up with a wire brush. The hole is closer to football (or rugby) size, and brand new holes have been uncovered. They're barely visible here, but a few inches to the left of the massive hole is a series of small holes.
And the rear fared no better:
The little hole is much bigger, and you can see plenty of other spots where the metal is rusted completely through. This is less visibly ugly than the front side, but the section I need to repair is likely just as big.
Tonight I started cutting out this old metal. I had the wrong sized cutting disks for my grinder (thank you Home Despot) so I just did the front section. I’ll take pictures tomorrow and update with the next post.
So far, this kind of work is both gratifying and laborious. It’s very easy to see how a small job can turn into a Sisyphean pursuit of perfection, but I have too many projects lined up to treat this one as anything other than a functional fix. I’d like it to be a very durable repair, but at this stage of the game I have no delusions of achieving beauty or whatever it is that body work purists look for.
March 10th, 2009 at 9:45 am
I’m right behind you here. SS rust repair will be followed by GTV-R, R is for rust. Fun.
Matt
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:45 am
Very cool. I think its x10 for every vehicle. It applies to my Volvo for sure. I’m sick of having my scraper break through the floor in places I was banking on being sound. I’ll be joining you in functional floor repairs. word up.
November 18th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Looking back over the work you’ve done on this thing… DAMN! you’ve done a lot in short time.. good job!