A Little Bit Of Engine Bay And A Lot Of Sound Deadening

This morning we pushed KITT to the end of the garage so we could clean the engine bay without getting water all over the garage.

I sprayed the engine bay with a non-toxic cleaner.

Then I rinsed the engine bay with water.

I also cleaned KITT's windshield.

Sara repeated the process of spraying cleaner and then rinsing.

While she was doing that, I decided to touch up the metal trim piece for the blower housing that I dropped and scratched. Since I do not have the paint booth set up, I temporarily secured the trim piece to a piece of wood so I could hold it while spray painting it outside.

One quick coat of black spray paint covered up the scratches.

We then continued spraying the engine bay with clean water to rinse away all the cleaner and dirt. In this picture I am spraying water into the cowl to thoroughly rinse it out.

Sara used the pump sprayer:

and I used the hose:

Then we wiped the engine bay down with rags to dry up all the water.

I pushed KITT back inside the garage and squeegeed the water outside.

Here is the engine bay cleaned and dried. At this point we stopped for lunch.

After lunch we were planning to install the blower housing and heater box. I wanted to first clean and soak the bolts in a bath of WD-40, but I discovered I was out of WD-40 so I could not. Rather than go to the store to get more WD-40, Sara suggested we move on to the sound deadening. KITT was full of parts, so we had to first empty him out. I put the foglights and brackets in the blue tub marked "New Parts for KITT". (This is for my future reference.)

The Panhard/track bar was one of the items sitting inside KITT. (It had been sitting there since I painted it.) Sara cleaned it off and I installed it back on KITT, but I barely threaded the nuts on the bolts because I seem to be missing two washers on the driver side.

KITT is empty once again!

Sara spent the next 1.5 hours cleaning the interior of KITT.

I removed the '83-'92-style seatbelt brackets while Sara was cleaning (which made more of a mess for her to clean up). I plan to install the '82-style door sills and seat belts. The bracket is not needed with the '82-style seatbelts; instead the seatbelt uses the bolt the bracket was secured with.

Sara continued to clean KITT, and I picked up around the garage.

Sara cleaned both the interior and exterior of KITT. When she cleaned the rear trunk lip, she discovered RUST. The trunk seal sat over top of this lip, and was on the car when we delivered it to our ex-painter. The rust is above the lock mechanism for the trunk.

The rust is above the lock mechanism for the trunk on both the outside and the inside.

The lip rust is also along the driver side rear quarter panel.

Here you can see the channel where the seal would sit. Our ex-painter painted over the rust cancer instead of properly addressing and treating the issue.

This is another shot of the rust in the channel along the driver side rear quarter panel. It goes all the way up. I am going to sand these areas down and apply POR-15.

I took a picture of the cleaned interior. Sara did a beautiful job.

I wanted to make sure that we had poked through all the holes for the wire harness clips. I used an ice pick to puncture the RAAMmat BXT II sound deadening.

I took pictures to document all the holes, mounting hardware, studs, etc. on the interior. After the Ensolite is covering the interior it is going to be a lot harder to locate these mounting points when installing carpet and plastics. The following 18 pictures are for later reference.

Here I am laying out the Ensolite sound deadening.

We attempted to use a 28" strip on Ensolite for the entire length of the driver side floor pan.

We decided that method was not ideal. The Ensolite is very flexible but it is still like working with fabric. It will only bend and give so much before tearing. Once you peel off the backing, the entire backside is extremely sticky adhesive. Basically where you put it down the first time is where it stays. With such a large piece we developed air pockets, especially around the seat rails. When I tried to smooth them out with my roller, the Ensolite tore.

We decided to work with 12" x 12" panels instead.

I was looking at the sail panel and remembered that I had planned to put the Ensolite on the backside of the plastics, instead of directly over the RAAMmat BXT II.

We covered as much as we could with our 12" x 12" panels, and then pieced in the rest.

We stopped working about 7:30PM tonight. Here is what we accomplished so far:

Sara is happy because we are done for the night, and I am grilling steaks for dinner!