Matthew Taylor's Journal

11-26-15
A friend of mine for high school still brings up the holes in my floorboards. There is just something about the Spits floor pans, they just really like to rot out. So, I was very happy to see this one had 2 actual floor pans! And originals at that. I attributed that to the fact the pans where magic, or the fact the car has been primarily in storage since 1980 or so. Since the later was more likely, I expected that the pans would soon rot right out the second we started driving it regularly. To prevent that, I put the boy to work with a wire wheel and a gallon of truck bed liner.

The next order of business was to get our "shop air" up to the level required to take the paint off a car, and put something back on. My 2 1/2 gallon compressor was not going to cut it. I picked up (ok, a fork lift picked up) a 60 gallon, 11.5 scfm (@90 psi) compressor. We ran 220 to it, and laid out a 50 foot sloping header, with drop legs drains, a regulator and a couple water separators. Problem was, to get the fall we wanted, we had to run it in the attic. Cole did a bang up job crawling around, and strapping it up nice and tight. Just ask him, he will tell you how good a job he did. If you have a system even slightly inferior, you wont have to ask him, he will volunteer the info on it. And now he knows why it pays to stay in school....

Planing on using a chemical stripper, we laid tarps on the garage floor, tape them down, and went to work removing everything from the car. Bagging all the hardware, and taping the bags to the main parts, we created a "file" system in the floor to ceiling shelving next to the work area. Everything came off quickly, and we took lots of reference pictures.