Gutting the interior

When you gut a fish, you remove all the bad stuff from the inside; this is the same principle...

Since this is not going to be a street-driven car, virtually all of the "luxuries" of the Z can be removed. Furthermore, one of the easiest ways to make a car faster is by removing weight. Not only does this start out being one of the cheapest modifications, but it will help the car accelerate and brake faster, as well as improve the handling characteristics because it has less mass to have to compensate for.

I started by removing the seats and then the carpet, just to see how much rust was present on the floorboards, and before I knew it I had my mallet and chisel out and was scraping off sound deadening along the floor pans, trans tunnel, and the entire rear deck. I didn't use any common tricks (dry ice, heat gun) and probably took me 4-5 hours to get all of the insulation out of the car. I kinda liked the idea of doing it old-school since the car is so old, and it also got me more familiar with all the insides of the car.

At that point, it was starting to look pretty bare inside. I had discovered that the car was not originally blue (it had obviously been repainted as part of a semi-restoration), but that it came from the factory in "New Sight Orange", color code 918. Furthermore, I had uncovered a considerable amount of rust in both of the floor pans, which I would like to replace, but I was still feeling good about the car. There weren't any huge holes or major rust in places that couldn't be repaired.

Then I got curious. I was planning on re-wiring the body eventually to eliminate all of the extra connections to stuff I was no longer using. I figured I might as well see what was going on in the dash and clean that up too. Removing the dash for the first time took be a couple of hours b/c I was tagging every plug that I disconnected so that I would know where it went later on. Eventually I had the entire dash out, along with it's harness. Soon after, I had the heater core and dash out and the only thing left at the front of the car was the steering wheel.

In the end, the only real interior components that I didn't remove were the front headliner trim and A-pillar trim (because removing them requires the removal of the front windshield), the steering column, and a few random bits and peices here and there that would have been larger projects than necessary to remove. Since the car now had 3 colors (original orange, blue overspray, and freshly uncovered "primer" where the sound deadening had been), I decided that I would spray the entire interior to have on consistent color and give the car a cleaner appearance. Click here for the details on my interior paint project...