Project: The Chariot of Victory

[SlimKlim]

Day 1: Triage.

No one that knows me should be surprised that the first step of my RallyX beater project involves a deep clean.

This thing has clearly served as a pickup truck for the past decade or so and as far as I can tell has never once been vacuumed or wiped down. Open any door and you're hit with a stale cig/mildew smell that could gag a mule. The amount of bark, mulch, gravel, concrete, hay, dog hair, and the visible, sludgy layer of cigarette tar is almost comical. More power to the PO for extracting every bit of functionality out of this thing, but we needed to do something about it in order for us to work on it and drive it around before the interior finds its way into the landfill.

The patient.







Check out the console in front of the shifter in particular.





The procedure.

I vacuumed as much of the loose crap out of the carpets as much as possible, I was probably able to lift out 80% of the dirt, and what's left is in there to stay. It's actually worn through in a couple spots, and peeling away where it meets the dash up front and rear seats in the back, basically begging to get torn out put out of its misery.

Then I upped the concentration of my purple power spray bottle to about 3 parts degreaser to 1 part water, filled a 5 gallon bucket half way full and got to work wiping down all of the hard surfaces. Spraying each panel with degreaser, brushing everything loose and wiping it down with a wet rag followed by a dry one. 30 minutes later I had a bucket of solid black water and a much happier car.





Then, I heavily treated all of the fabric surfaces with Odo-ban and let it flash off while washing the exterior of the car. For the outside I just turned the pressure washer on it to knock off all the really heavy/loose grit. Then snapped on the snowfoamer to coat the poor thing in suds (easily the best it's been treated in its 200k life), and gave the whole car a quick scrub. Then another pass with the pressure attachment taking particular care to knock all of the foliage out of the panel gaps.











Once the interior had dried somewhat I hit it with the Odo-ban again. And again. Then I took a shower, got lunch, came home and bug bombed the thing with about half a can of Ozium. It's currently sitting in the garage with all the windows up letting that magical cancer in a can do its thing. I'm not sure any more can be done at this point, short of burning formaldehyde crystals in there (the method they use to kill ebola). It'll certainly make it a lot more pleasant to work on, which was really the only goal.

Tomorrow morning we're heading up to Mt. Airy to hopefully find & pull good rear end hardware to fix the bearing issue and convert us over to disc brakes. Might as well gather all of the required parts to get this thing driving right before we tear it to bits in my garage. :thumbup: