As I was removing miscellaneous components in the engine bay I came across another set of fiberglass patches underneath the battery tray, a common problem area on these cars due to damage from battery acid.
These patches were much more solidly adhered than the ones in the trunk had been so I decided to leave them mostly intact for now, the eventual media blasting should take care of them. The next picture shows the rust holes from the underside of the battery tray through to the front of the engine bay.
Despite many applications of PB Blaster over the past few weeks I still had to break out the impact driver and a breaker bar to free the outer shock tower braces. I’m confident they had never been removed from the car following initial assembly. I plan to delete the shock towers as part of this project so these will not be getting re-installed.
It made my heart hurt to remove the headliner as it was still in fantastic shape, and by all accounts is miserable to replace. That said, it was a little cathartic to grab it from the corners and essentially rip it out of the car.
One interesting thing that I found while removing the headliner was that the rearmost 6 inches or so on each of the C-pillars were wound several times around a thin piece of wood which was then clamped down to the rear shelf by metal tabs.
I went ahead and saved the headliner just in case it comes in handy as a trimming template for its successor.
