First Triage of Problems

There are quite a few problems with this little car, but two issues stand out. The most obvious that I noticed on the ride to my house is that the engine runs pretty badly, very rough and noisy. Hopefully I can get it running smoothly with basic tuning and not a major overhaul but I'll talk more about the engine in a later post. The second problem is the one that I mentioned in my last post and I'll devote most of this posting to, that this car is totally not waterproof.



The seals on all the windows are dry and cracked and don't protect the car from the Pittsburgh weather in the least. Unfortunately, the car has been stored outside for at least a year in this condition without so much as a tarp over it. It was raining when I got home and I spent all afternoon cleaning out the garage to make room for the little car while it was getting wetter. Once I pulled it inside, I ripped out the back seat and all the floor mats and padding to see what the floors looked like. The bad news was that they were soaking wet and had lots of surface rust on them but the good news is that the rust seems superficial. Now that it's two days later and the floors are dried out, I can see that they are in pretty good shape.

The black spots in the rust are not holes, they're just flakes of the black paint that the previous owner had painted the floor with. Almost all of the paint on the right side stuck to the carpet padding when I pulled that up. I'm going to have to pull everything out of the cabin (seats, battery, remaining carpet) and apply POR-15, a rust proofing paint. Obviously, this car is not going outside when there is any chance of rain until I get the seals fixed.