So progress has been slow, I have been tied up with a combination of DIY projects, child care and work, however when ever I can I have been crawling under the car and stripping off the old under seal to see how good the floor is. Most of it is surprisingly sold, however I could not ignore the welded patches which were pretty badly patched, so with grinder in hand I carefully removed the patch of the drivers side
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This isn’t too bad, they had basically welded a patch of metal over a hole, this it’s located right near the front of the drivers seat I suspect where water had gotten in the car it had pooled under carpet and rusted the floor from the inside.
This isn’t going to be a bad one to deal with, I will cut out the rot and replace with good metal.
To do this patch work I picked myself up a tiny little gasless mug welder from Amazon during their prime event, it’s a lovely little unit but having not welded in about 13-15 years I definitely need to do some practice, anyway here is the welder I got and I have been enjoying practicing on the old exhaust before it goes in the bin
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Now I will get to the worst of the rust I’ve found so far but I have to share a slight off topic little purchase I also made,
A couple of miles down the road from me, once a month is a very large auto jumble, I went a long a couple of weeks back because I really wanted an old oil can like the ones I remember my grandfather having in the 90s,
He died in 95 and so we threw loads of them out when clearing out his garage.
Anyway I found this lovely little can, cost me just £3
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There was no paint on the can, there were some fragments that suggested it was previously red, the top part was also in pretty bad shape to I gave the whole thing a really good clean up painted the can black and nickel plated the whole top part, then didn’t clean it up or polish it to give it an old patina.
I love it, such a lovely little thing and will come in handy doing jobs around the house. It’s currently filled with some left over oil from my Punto Evo.
So the worst rust, well on the passenger side there was a very large patch of steel just welded over the underside of the floor, I needed to cut the steel off to take a better look, and well, it doesn’t look good.
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What you can see is the panel I cut off hanging down to the Left of the picture, the sill and the floor pan in the center, this is located at the back of the passenger seat and as you can see it’s a pretty large area of rot.
That all being said I have been under the car again tonight and it’s a lot better than you might think. No part of the sill is rusted, that is solid, there is a cross member through the middle of the rot which is also untouched, so it really is just the floor that needs replacement. I suppose to do it properly I am going to have to take out the whole interior. The previous repair being over the top of the whole large area meant any water in the passenger side of the car now had its own reservoir to fill up under the bottom of the car.
I suspect a pool of water had developed between the plat and the floor and just caused the floor pan to disintegrate.
Anyway repairs are going to take a while the whole interior needs to come out along with the carpets, so while I do that I will also start stripping back the body work here is the progress made on sanding off the very bad respray it’s had in the past.
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Oh and I have also been refurbishing the Punto GT 5 spoke wheels I obtained, you can see it fitted to the car without tires in the picture about, about a thousand times better than the much later model Punto wheels fitted when I got the car
