I had to work all through the weekend, but I got a little bit of time this morning -- so I picked up a small project. In the course of the recent engine and suspension work on my car, we did a little bit of weight redistribution, moving the Halon bottle for the fire system and the battery from their front corner locations to positions near the feet of the front passenger. Part of this is to reduce weight near the ends (front or rear) of the car, and part of it was for safety. If you put the front end into a wall or another car, it would be simple to kink the copper lines form the fire bottle, and also easy to have the battery cause problems if there's an impact and it's right out front.
Now here's my disclaimer. This is NOT a show car. The front trunk is packed to the gills every time I go to the track, and the stuff that gets put in there is not kind to paint. I've never cleaned the trunk area, either. But taking those two things out of the front corners took a not-very-pretty situation and made it downright ugly.
Prepare yourself. Here's a 38-year-old trunk that's in desperate need of a little TLC.
Normally there would be a couple of cardboard pieces to block the view of the ventilation stuff and also the wires around the old-technology fuse box. But those were chucked out (for weight) long ago.
Today, though, I decided to do kind of a bare-minimum job, which means I went in there with a rag and some mineral spirits, and then followed up with a brush (that's right, a brush) on the sheet metal and also the gas tank. No masking tape was sacrificed for this effort. This thing's headed for the track, not a show.
I also dropped in the Rennline aluminum piece (from our host) to cover the ventilation stuff. I had to cut a piece of it out because I added a vacuum assist for the brakes.
Here's the new divider in place. I also put back the lid for the smuggler's trunk.
The piece I cut out of the aluminum divider was about the right size to sub in for the missing cardboard door to hide the bird's nest of wires for the fuses. I bent it a couple of times in the vise to make it fit.
The holes make it faster.
Here's the whole thing. There's nothing I can do about the dent in the gas tank. And to save time, I made a grey paint color for the tank by adding some white to the semigloss black I used everywhere else. I hope I don't ever have to match the color.
It's still definitely not a show car. And the cosmetic standards for this kind of interior area were different back in the 1970s. And of course there was carpet and a shiny spare there, back in the day. But this will do for my purposes. It's cleaner. It's got fewer chips and scratches.
And for trips to the track, it'll look like this:
Next track day is in two weeks.