Time to get serious. If I was to continue on this course of “doing it right”, I had to immediately address the rust and corrosion, most of which was in the floor pans and heater channels.

First, I pulled the heavily mud and oil-caked transaxle out and set it aside for a good cleaning and refurb later on.

Amazingly, all the body-to-pan bolts came out without breaking , although a few of them needed to be coaxed out with plenty of rust penetrant and prayers. The four front firewall pan bolts were an absolute nightmare and made horrible noises while being extracted. I made it a point to NOT use impact wrenches for these as the process required a delicate feel for what was going on. It took about 2 hours just to get those out – lots of forward and backward wrench turning. It was a miracle that none of these bolts busted off – corrosion had eaten half the diameters away in some cases!

The fuel tank was removed and the front body support bolts were relieved of their duty. I couldn’t believe how dirty the front beam area was… what a mess!

I used 4×4 fence posts placed on a pair of modified jack stands bolted to tire dollies at the front and rear. These beams were placed under the bumper brackets. Using a floor jack, I gradually raised the body off the pan and locking the jack stands as they went up. Now, the whole body can actually be spun around inside the garage independently of the chassis. There was a method to my madness: I positioned the chassis on a homemade dolly in order to roll it out from under the body whenever I needed to – kind of like a VW trundle bed! Turned out to be a great space saver solution in my already cramped garage space.

With the pan out from under the car, I could now direct my attention to rebuilding the whole chassis, starting with new floor pans.