Dressing Her Up
For my first six months of residency in California, I lived in an apartment in Fremont. It was borderline torture to go without a workshop or a car to tinker with. I was driving a Subaru Legacy that was a hand-me-down from my parents. That afforded me a reliable, practical, fuel efficient car to use in Bay Area traffic and long weekend drives to Lake Tahoe, but there was nothing really special about that car. It lacked character and there wasn’t really anything I was interested in fiddling with on it. Skies cleared for the grease monkey in me around January, 2015, when I found a house to rent with some coworkers. A 2 car garage beckoned and begged to host a small blue Fiat. I spent a few months planning shipment of the car and waiting for the weather in Wisconsin to clear up enough to make that happen.
Finally, in May, I had arranged for and open trailer to deliver the Fiat across the country to San Jose. My parents bundled the topless convertible up on the cold end of the journey in order for it to survive any weather the transporter might come upon during the trip. The gal was definitely happy to be in a warmer climate!
Now that we were reunited, I had my work cut out for me to make some much-needed improvements. Namely, installing the convertible top that I’d owned since my first year of ownership and adding some interior creature comforts….like carpeting. Putting the top on seemed pretty straightforward, but in hindsight, I could have done a better job. I prepped the roof bows and bought the adhesives needed to do the job and had my roommate help me with the install. I closely followed the instructions so carefully laid out by Chris Obert & Co. but did not put enough weight to their advice about installing the top to the forward bow. I was warned that poor execution could cause “the front of the top to stick up like a teenager’s spiked hair.” Well...sure enough, my tan top started to look like Guy Fieri. I still haven’t fixed this to date, but it may be something I circle back to soon.
As mentioned, the next project, which I started in August, was to add carpeting and insulation to the floor. For a few years, I had been cruising around with sheet metal floors, painted and covered by some floor mats I’d scavenged from an Audi A6 (these actually worked pretty well!). Needless to say, it was like driving around inside a tin can. I wasn’t aware of this, of course, until I had remedied the situation and experienced life on the other side.
Just Paint:
I stripped out the center console, mid console, and seats to get access to the entire floor pan. I purchased a roll of foil-lined foam, a roll of underlayment padding, and a roll of black carpeting. I went to work creating templates for the shapes of each piece, cutting out what I needed in each material. For edging, I purchased nylon webbing, like you’d see on backpack straps, then folded that over the edges and sewed them on with a heavy duty sewing machine.
Heat Shield:
Jute:
The carpet was held in place by fir-tree retaining clips. This made it pretty straightforward - I drilled a hole in the sheet metal, laid the carpet on top and, with a corresponding hole in the other materials, simply pushed the clips through. This meant no adhesives or velcro, but still a well retained carpet. The trick ended up being those holes in the fabric. Drill bits would twist up in it, so I used a cheap soldering iron to stab through the fabric and cauterize a whole. This smelled awful, but it worked brilliantly!
Carpet in:
Genius that I am, I did this bit of project in the dog days of California heat, so there I am, stuck in the garage, head stuffed under the dashboard, surrounded by insulation and heat-reflective materials, tugging on carpeting and wielding a soldering iron. I could have filled a swimming pool with the sweat the poured out of me in those few days. It was all worth it, though, when I finally took it for a drive. I thought that my ears were plugged up because the sound levels had dropped so drastically! Gone were the rattles and road noises, the heat from the engine through the firewall, and the hard floor on my heels.
Finished Product:
