Finally a spare afternoon! I was able to finish the passenger side today, at least the metal-work part of it, and celebrated by taking a quick drive around the neighborhood. This car is so fun to drive, it’ll be great when it’s fun AND comfortable.

Today’s exercise was more or less a repeat of the last time. I have no delusions now of anything being easy or particularly good. I do have delusions that exterior panels will be easier to work on, being on the exterior and all, but at least I can leave good enough alone for the floors.

Fitting the big piece. I left the weird corner piece out on the first pass; consider that a lesson learned from doing the front job.

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Last Saturday I spent the whole day trying my hand at welding, and have already discovered some hidden truths about the process, truths that at least pertain to absolute beginners like myself:

1. if you spend one hour on the job, maybe five minutes of it is spent actually welding
2. for each ten welds you make, maybe two are any good
3. of the other eight, at least half compromise the existing metal in some way, necessitating further welding
4. cutting metal without a bench or specialized tools is really hard
5. finally some good news: sheet metal is very malleable, so whatever lousy job you do creating your patch piece can usually be mitigated with a hammer, grinder, snips, and pliers. And more welds.

Here’s the result of my work on Saturday

The TI floor, nearly done. A mistake and requisite patch at upper right added two hours to the job.

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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.

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