Removing The Mud Flaps And Muffler

The last few nights I have been working on the rear of the car. I plan to lower the rear axle tomorrow and wanted to get as much stuff out of the way as possible. 

I started with the driver side mud flap. I am not keeping the mud flaps, so I was not concerned with getting them off in one piece. I ended up using a combination of drill, screwdriver, vise grips and utility knife to remove the mud flaps and the three screws securing each.

Passenger side mud flap before and after shots:

I had to get the tires out from under KITT. They made a good safety bumper when we removed the front spring!

Here is a shot of the dual muffler set up and the two brackets that will have to be removed to lower and remove the muffler.

Driver side muffler bracket:

Passenger side muffler bracket:

In this shot you can see the exhaust pipe is already cut off about a foot in front of the rear differential. 

The muffler is off! I had to cut the twin exhaust pipes to remove the assembly without taking off the panhard bar.

Just look at that shiny gloss black! Soon KITT's entire underbody will look that good...

With the muffler out of the way I could remove the heat shield as well. The heat shield covers up the bottom of the gas tank. This shield is actually in two pieces and the smaller of the two sits right above the twin exhaust pipes.

The larger piece of the heat shield has been removed. You can clearly see the gas tank now. Yes, that is carpet on top of the upper gas tank strap. Not that I am surprised that the same person that used a bike tire to seal a hose in the engine bay would use carpet to pad the gas tank strap. Ingenuity at its finest.

The larger piece of the heat shield:

The smaller piece of the heat shield:

Here is the remaining twin exhaust pipe section. I needed to remove the heat shields in order to gain enough clearance around the panhard bar.

The gas tank and panhard bar. 

I took this shot to illustrate where the second heat shield was.

This is the plastic fender liner covering the fuel filler neck.

Two screws later and it has been removed. I noticed there is a small crack in the plastic. I plan to repair this with some POR-Patch and a piece of the old fender well.

This is a close up of the fuel filler neck.

I am not sure who did this paint job, but I will not let them come anywhere near KITT. Disgusting.

This is the passenger rear fender area. The drain plug you can see in the picture is actually the bottom of the storage area where the spare tire sits. The pinch weld where the storage area meets the wheel well is bent up. This is also the area that had rusted through and that we patched with PowerMesh and POR-15.

I used a vise grips to very carefully straighten the pinch weld. There are some cracks in this, but I will also seal and reinforce this with POR-Patch.