Fiat 124 Spider Interior Restoration Part I - Carpet

The interior of the Spider is in average condition for a thirty year old Fiat, yeah that bad. Part of my rolling restoration plan is to re-do the interior from the ground up. Literally, starting with the floors. Unfortunately since this requires taking out the seats, consoles, carpet, insulation, and then scraping, begging-off and chemical-bombarding the rubber liner that has become part of the floor...this will need to be done over the course of a 'free' weekend (not many of those on my calendar).

Then I will POR-15 the floors, replace the wool insulation with foil-lined foam (home ducting type) and of course the carpet.The OEM carpet was a corn-row type that is, amazingly, common stock at home depot and Lowes. Becca and I picked out a lighter color than the car shipped with. We think it will give the car less of a 'old-dark-dirty' look.

Here is the test fitting of the driver side floor carpet.

This weekend I removed most the insulation and rubber from the immediate area, however I will need to strip the interior floorboards using a wire brush and solvent before I can start POR'ing and insulating. Good news is that no rust whatsoever found in the floor panels so far. (shocking)

Fiat 124 Spider Abarth-type bumper conversion

Like all post 1974 classic roadsters, my Spider is (was) afflicted with rather substaincial double chrome bar bumpers. The front bumper does a particuarly good job of spoiling the Pinninfarina styling. Remembering a couple cars back ( a Jeep Wrangler 'TJ') I remembered its bumper overriders (the rubber blocks bolted to the Jeep's rain gutter...er' I mean bumper) and thought they would look pretty good bolted to the end of my Fiat's bumper shocks. I think I was right.



This is what remains of my trusty dremel. It caught a-flame while I was using the cutting wheel to extend the 10mph bumper shock bracket to accommodate the Jeep TJ bumper over-riders I purchased off Ebay.








Here is the modified bracket.











Note that after burning up my dremel I used the proper, if noisy, tool for the job (angle grinder).