Interior Disassembly, part 1 - seats, carpets, and first look at the floors.

Enough planning - let's take stuff apart!

The interior is the first part of the teardown. It needs to come out for two reasons. First, we need to get a good look at the floors (a notorious Mustang trouble spot - they tend to be rusted out and/or badly patched). Looking under the car, the floors look good on this car, but you really won't know until the carpet comes out. The second reason is this car is a musty, moldy, smelly mess - everything soft has absorbed the odors of - what? Mice? - and will have to be replaced/rebuilt. So the seats, the carpets, the dash, headliner, all of it has to come out. Then the interior trim panels will be removed, and the floors can be evaluated.

 Before the first wrench falls, one last look at the time capsule. Now - let's get this party started.

Front seats come out easy enough - there's four bolts under each seat, hiding under those plastic plugs. If those are missing, the bolts may be 'challenging' to remove after years of exposure. 

Lift and pull, easy-peasy. The carpet is covered in something like...birdseed?

Neat find: both seats have little metal tags with part number information on them! 

Both front seats are out. They smell bad even from here. The fabric they're covered in is called 'Comfortweave' which I think was part of the deluxe interior option. The seating surfaces are perforated vinyl and the edges are solid vinyl. This is reproduced, and I like the look of it, so I'm going to get all the seats recovered in this same material. 

The back seat is somewhat more complicated. The lower portion just pops out from the floor at the front, and the back is hooked around some brackets that are welded to the floor. But the upper portion is part of the fold-down seat, which has some steps needed for removal. 

Aaaaannnd, that's nasty. Maybe it's not so bad - once I scrub it down it'll look better. Right? The original underlay padding beneath the seat is in pretty good shape, which leads me to think that no one's gutted this car before. 

Next is the fold-down seat components. It's made of one rear floor section way in the back, and the folding portion which serves as the upper half of the rear seat (here in the folded-down position). In the back is the trap door, which can flip up and give you room to put long things (lumber? skis? a fully unfolded paper interstate map?) in the Mustang's spacious interior.

  

The rear floor section is held down by some screws near the front and some spring strips in the back. Just remove the screws and slide the section up and forward to get it out. 

Here's the floor section removed (and the trap door flipped up). And a peek into the horror that is the trunk in the background. 

The main part of the rear seat back comes out with some bolts and shims. The shims are original, but the foil, which you can see on the floor bracket, I doubt. Do this on both sides and remove the folding seat section. It's much heavier than one would think it would need to be.

Here's the entire seat assembly removed. This entire assembly needs to be cleaned, re-carpeted, and the chrome needs some help. But it's a complete set!

 Here'e the two rear seat cushions out of the car. There are some rips and splits in these, otherwise they're in OK shape. And, yeah, they stink too.

Back to the interior, next out is the lower console. I gave it a shake or two and got a lot of seeds and such coming out from under the console. That can't be good... 

Now the seeds make more sense. Dead mouse. And it's not fresh. It's been under that console for a very long time. This is where I mention Hantavirus and that I'm doing this work with gloves and a respirator. Where there's mice, there's mice droppings and that's no-kidding bad news. Safety first!

Console and seats are out. 

Carpet set is out. It's held in with just a few small screws. Looks to be original and had all the insulating jute material under is as well. Of course, it smells nasty as well.

First signs of some trouble - there's some rust on the passenger toe-board,  The dark stuff in the foot-well is not rust, but a dark sticky substance, like what you'd get if you dumped a bottle of Coke in the carpet and the water dried up and left all the sugar.

The drivers' foot-well has surface rust as well. It passes the 'stab it with a screwdriver' test - no holes, so hooray for this side. 

Overall, the floors look very solid, especially considering the shape of some other cars I've seen out there. A little surface rust here and there, some pitting that may end up getting patched, but mostly they're in great shape! 

The rear floor section is less good. There's a lot off issues here at first glance. The rest of the interior will have to come out to know the extent of this mess. 

This is not good. No sir, not good at all. Spoiler alert - this will take two months of cleaning, scraping, welding, and grinding to make better.