More stripping...no, not that kind!

More results. Not bad for hand work.

The Pain.

The pain, below; the joy, above. I decided to strip the cheap undercoating that was applied to the body and pan and apply Master Series rust preventative. There's a link to that product website on the sidebar.

A Friend

Lo and behold. This IS an old car. Found this in one of the heater ducts that feed the rear footwell.

Shift Rod Bushing

A pic of the new shift rod bushing and the SS fuel line.

Leak Test

The result? the coupling held 115+ psig for better than a week with absolutely no leakdown. I'd say that's a successful test. Sure, vibration could be an issue...but that would be an issue for any threaded connection on the car...

For reference there are supports, internal to the tunnel, that are used to hold the fuel line in place. If you look closely at the previous post, you can see the front most support which also holds the clutch cable tube and a tube for the heater flap cables. I threaded my new tube thru that.

At the rear, at the point where the tunnel splits to create the transmission mounting yoke, there is a support as well. That support also holds the driver's side brake lines IIRC. It was nearly impossible for me to thread my tube back through that support. So I lashed the support to the brake line using a cable tie. The tube seems inherently much more secure than did the original tube.

Fall '05 Effforts

Now I've had an opportunity to evaluate the state of the paint job etc on the Ghia. I've determined that I want to do several things:
1) replace the fuel line with a stainless line
2) apply rust preventative paint to the underbody
3) install a new shift rod bushing
4) straighten and install the shift rod

So forthwith are some pics from these efforts. Above shows a hole I cut in the tunnel, and the stainless fuel line installed. Yes, that's a threaded coupling. Yes, there's possibility of a leak. To address this, I used red Loctite on the coupling threads, then did a leak test.

Stainless, while being more corrosion resistant than carbon steel, is more difficult to work. Despite my best effort, I could not thread a continuous piece of SS thru the various supports and access points on the Ghia. If I had used CS I think it could have been done - such as using brake line tubing which is fairly easy to bend and shape. But I was determined to use stainless.