Cowl Replacement Continued

After the coats of POR 15 in the interior of the cowl, the 3M seam sealer was applied to the interior.

Next the splash guard had to be welded back in. So I prepped the area and welded that in.

Prepped the side piece and welded that in.

Same thing applied to this side.

So this cowl is mix match of pieces of different cars and you would think the stampings would be similar and they should interchange easily. No. They didn't. I had to massage quite a bit on this side to get the seams closed. It's clear they had different dies for different cars (heater only vs factory HVAC) or different factories. Dunno, but they are different. I spent quite a bit of time on this. Even the front section lines up different. I doubled and triple checked the critical dimensions on everything and all seems well. Just drove me nuts.

I gave it another coat of POR 15 over the welded areas.

I know I seem like a anti corrosion religious zealot, but having grown up in the rust belt I'm paranoid after loosing a couple cars to insidious rust. I want to be able to drive this thing in all but the worst conditions and know I don't have to worry about it.

The cowl welding is done! All that's left is to install the door nut plates.

In the midst of this I did cut the hole for the floor shift.

This is the centre console and I needed to mark out a proper size hole and not the meteor hole Ford originally cut.

This is the piece of the original floor with the hole cut by Ford, or rather Ray Charles by the looks of it. I have what I believe to be an adequate hole marked out in the floor above it. Big difference.......

Seems to work just fine in that small hole. One nice thing about an HVAC firewall is that cavernous centre opening so I can stick myself through and shoot this photo.

I bought a generic boot but being the fulcrum is up top and not under the tunnel it won't really work well. I shall have to return to the mothership to have a think about this further on what to use as a boot for the long term.

More to come.