Day 2 - More seats, all the seats, the best seats and some floor.

Another day, another 12 seats. Armed with a couple of new ultra-thin cut-off blades for the grinder and the technique nailed from last time I got the remainder of the seats out in no time, like less than an hour. I didn't even use a whole blade to finish. I wish someone had told me that the seat squabs (bottom pieces) come out as easily as they do - it makes getting the more reluctant of the chair-rail (the wall side mounting) bolts out a lot easier. Also, disconnecting the heaters from the seat bases was a real arse - getting the squab out and undoing every screw I could see helped but there was still the near-impossible jiggle of the mounting bracket to figure out. I'm still not sure I could tell you how they're supposed to dislocate.

That task complete I was going to quit (it had been my goal for the day) but it had got done so quickly I decided to carry on with removing anything else that was in the way of pulling up the vinyl/lino and plywood floor. There was a fuel tank filler cover, finish strips down one side and around wheel wells, and a duct on the other that concealed and protected the heater pipes that run from the engine at the rear to a couple of space heaters and the demisting heaters at the front.

 

This proved to be the most frustrating part of the day with many Philips head screws full of muck requiring cleaning out before I could get the driver into them. Some rounded anyway and then I cut a slot in them and tried a flat bit. That worked for most but a couple were stubborn and refused to move and then I resorted to just cutting the heads off (I'd avoided this as I didn't want to damage any of the components as I didn't know what I was going to reuse at this point - the duct I definitely wouldn't for this purpose but could see it being used for something somewhere else.

That done I was interested to see what was going on underneath the flooring, grabbed a hold of a loose edge and pulled. It came up super-easy, probably because it was pretty damp down there. I'd noticed the floor undulated a fair bit and suspected the ply wasn't in very good shape and this confirmed my fears. Soaked, swollen ply probably meant a rusty floor underneath. I got most of one side of lino flooring up then attacked the fat, countersunk head bolts that held the ply down. These came out pretty easily but quite a few were in pretty bad shape and a few heads simply collapsed when I put any torque on them. 

I needed a wrecking bar to get under the ply to lift it, which I didn't have, so moved onto removing the middle strip of flooring. This was stuck down much better that the side so I gave up on that idea pretty quickly and started putting a tool list together in my head for next time.

Another 3 hours spent and I'm, I'd say, half way to stripped out. Pretty stoked with that. Now I've just got to figure out what to do with the seats so they're not constantly in the way and needing moving over and over.    

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