Day 1843: Underlay and Carpets!

Obligatory "completed" picture first:

Yesterday I hit a snag with the engine so I'm moving onward. I've decided it's fine to work on the interior. I chose to start with the underlay and the carpet because they're 2 of the biggest boxes in my garage, and they shouldn't be an issue when getting the car painted. By then I intend on having glass back in, and they'll tape off the inside.

Unfortunately I forgot until after I was done that there's some interior painting that still needs to be done, so I guess I'm going to have to plastic tarp the carpet off and do that next!

OK here's what I did:

Last night I pulled out the underlay and carpet and laid them out to start getting out the wrinkles. I bought this stuff about 4 years ago, so I knew it was going to be an issue.

The underlay is kind of fragile, I'm not sure if it's always this delicate or if it's just from being old. But it seems to do the job ok. 

So I started with the underlay, and put the carpets in the sun:

OK so for the underlay it was in 3 pieces, so it's pretty simple to lay out and glue with spray adhesive to the floor. But I carefully cut through all the bolt holes and marked them with white spray paint:

I also completely forgot about the floor "drains". They're those 4 wide oval looking holes. They originally had a rubber stopper but I ordered steel ones and used a sealer. I don't intend on ever driving Frankenstang in the rain, but you need those sealed nicely so they're not soaking your floors with water.

OK after that I started fitting the front piece:

I used a lot of items in the garage for weight and dry fitted the right side. I took a heat gun to the corners until they were hot to the touch and then pushed the weights in the corners to take shape. 

Repeated on the left side:

OK while I was waiting for the weights to form the corners I started working on the wrinkles on the sides. I used the old door panel and kick panel for fitting, but I plan on replacing those later (just don't want the nice new pieces to get anything on them):

At this point I started spray adhesive gluing the center out, using the weights to hold down the carpet to the underlay to the floor. I sprayed quite a bit. Overall I used about 2 cans of adhesive:

Here's an example of using the door panels to hold down the carpet and check the fit/cut:

Just keep working from the center out, using the heat gun and glue in small spots at a time with weights. Be patient and let the spots dry before you move the weights and move on. I found about 30 minutes for each "spot" worked pretty well. 

Use the heat gun too! 

And all done: