Day 1 (Part 1) - Interior Disassembly

Day 1 (Part 1) of my mustang restoration project. Many thanks to John Welsh for helping out.

The entire project will include:

- Complete disassembly
- Front frame restoration (replacing the front frame rails)
- New patches on the center frame rails
- Properly welding in the floor panels and trunk panels
- Completely priming with a urethane based primer
- Painting the under body black
- Painting the car candy apple red (original vin color)
- Re-assembly of the entire car replacing needed parts with reproductions as needed
- Re-upholstering the seats
- Replacing the headliner
- Possibly more to come

For today we started tackling the interior. I followed the process that was laid out at average joe restoration:
http://averagejoerestoration.com/project-playboy/

I had already done some work in the interior before deciding to do a complete tear down, so I had a pretty good idea of where everything was. Still we decided to catalog every step of the way with details and pictures, this is that process:

1. Rear Seat Removal
The rear seats are easy to remove, simply lift up on the bottom of the bench and pull out. There's no bolts:

The top part of the bench is just as easy, just lift up off the two hanging hooks and remove:

Once you have the back bench out you will have to wait till you're ready to remove the seat belts before you can remove the cardboard backing:

2. Front Seat Removal:

The first thing you have to do is raise the car up on the side you want to work on. We chose to start with the driver side:

Once you have the car up in the air get under there, there are 4 nuts that need to be removed for the seat bolts to come out, then the seat can easily be removed. The nuts are in between the floor pans and the under body so you have to be careful not to loose your socket or the nut. So first, in order to get to them there are 4 rubber stoppers underneath where the seat is. They can be removed with a thin screwdriver:

Once you have them off you will see the seat nuts:

They can be removed with a 1/2 inch socket that is at least 1/2 inch in length, the bolts stick through rather far. Once you have all 4 removed bag them and tag them, the seats can be pulled right out. We ran into a couple snags, one of the bolts broke and one of the nuts fell between the floor pan. We made note of it and will have to replace minimal hardware. Keeping notes and every piece bagged and tagged is the most important part when it comes time to re-assemble.

3. Floor Sill Rails:
Basically super easy to remove, it's just phillips head screws:

4. Remove the rear 1/4 window rollers:
They are held one with tightened hex screws, just grab an an allen wrench and loosen them up.

5. Rear Interior 1/4 panels:
With the rollers off you can remove the 1/4 panels. It's 4 screws starting at the bottom floor and going up to the rear speaker board. There's also a weather strip that wraps over top of the 1/4 panel and the frame of the car, just pull this up and off. Once they're off you'll see these paper covers, pull these off and set aside, I will be replacing mine.

6. Floor Mats
We forgot... Took them out at this point.

7. Seat Belts
Definitely a pain in the ass if you don't know what you're doing. The front side ones are easy, they're just two bolts (5/8" socket). The center ones however have 2 nuts, one on the inside and one underneath the car. One person has to be underneath and the other up top. The passenger side one is especially hard because underneath the exhaust downpipe is in the way.

The rear seat belts are similar. The side ones have 2 nuts, someone must go underneath and hold it. They are behind the suspension so it's a little bit challenging to find.


8. Front interior 1/4 panels/ kick panels
On both sides there are kick panels, they're actually not screwed in, they're held in by weather stripping and the floor sill panels. With this out you can slide them out.


9. The Carpet
Now to rip out the carpet and underlayment. We had fun doing this because I'm replacing it so we could just tear it out. It's glued down so I don't know how you would keep it even if you wanted to.

Here's what it looks like all together:
Before:

After:

So now to clean it all up: