Well I decided to start off this weekend by fixing the stuff I screwed up last weekend.
I have a few more welds to make on the floor but I hate doing all the grinding at once so I weld a little, grind a lot. To that end, I had to grind some welds least weekend under the car and I couldn’t get the right angle so I took the handle off the little Milwaukee grinder I have and was holding it by the body with two hands.
Things were going along fairly well until my hands started to sweat. Combine that with holding the grinder above your head for an hour and one starts to tire. Never take your eye off the ball! I caught an edge of the shifter hole and the grinder shot out of my hand, proceeded to dance its way up my right arm all the way to my shoulder where it promptly wadded up my shirt and sat there going mmmmmmmmmmmm until I could unplug it.
I was stunned, not really hurt other than my ego, so I wrapped my arm up in a rag and duct tape and continued working on something else. In retrospect, the actual damage the grinder did was minor compared to the *ss chewing I got from the blonde. I did have my full face grinding shield on but was not wearing armor.
So, I screwed the handle back on the grinder this morning and began where I left off last Saturday looking like a badass with a eight inch scabbed over wound on my forearm and a six inch scar on my shoulder.
Here’s some of the stuff I’m finishing. Pretty mundane, nobody will see it but I know it’s there.
After an hour of grinding and before I repeated last Saturday, I moved on to something a little tamer, seat tracks. All this stuff has to be done, there’s no predetermined order the refinishing goes in other than you hope to plan well enough to have the parts you need ready when you need them. I’m trying to focus on the interior now that’s why I need to get all the floor welding done so I can finish the insulation.
Most people never take a seat track apart but they do come apart with relatively minor grief. The reason you would want to take the track apart, at least the reason I’m doing it is to get rid of thirty years of crud, crap and who knows what, out of the track and to regrease what I’m gonna call the trucs, the little roller bearing deals that carry the weight of your butt when you go back and forth when the lever is pulled.
You can see a fair view of the truc in this photo although I don’t have an arrow to point at it, it’s the piece with the little wheel in the center between the upper and lower track.
There’s a trick to getting these deals apart but rather than take up half the space of this post, I’m gonna let everyone figure it out on your own. I will tell you that there’s no drilling, grinding or modification to the track at all to get the trucs out.
Here’s all the parts for the two front bucket seat tracks.
Here’s a closer view of the springs and trucs. My advice on the springs, unless you’re going to replace them, glass bead them. When you glass bead, you’ll need to have the spring stretched out so you can get between the spring coils.
I used a piece of L bracket shelf upright that has holes on both sides. Pick the distance that allows light through the coils and blast away. Same goes for painting, only when you paint the springs you’ll need to leave them stretched out until they dry, most likely overnight.
Here’s a real close-up of one of the trucs. You can tell the amount of abuse these things take by the wear on the center roller.
And here are all of the trucks in a lacquer thinner spa, I’ve left these for overnight and will finish up on this tomorrow with compressed air and regrease.
Now, if this were a numbers matching future trailer queen I would be sending the tracks out for phosphate plating. It's not, so I've primed the tracks and will be painting them with a color that will blend in with my carpet and interior. Once the paint has had a week to dry, I'll reassemble.
And with that, I'm one step closer to seats in the car.
I’ll catch up with you all later. … Scott. ...
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Hopefully this winter I finally get going on this thing...You and I have had our projects for a long time (yours is looking good). Sad to look at the paperwork as to how long have owned it and to see it in the condition it is in. Luckily it is solid and that is only because I have stored it inside all these years. Really it isn't a cost factor, it is the time factor and being the OCD anal retentive idiot I am, everything takes a lot of time. 
