The Foam from Hell...

A quick update on some more of the work that has been accomplished/attempted.  I had hinted last post that I was going to encounter some serious resistance to Progress when I attempted to tackle doing the sound insulation in the cab interior, and that's no joke.  I am going to get into it a little bit more now and describe in some more detail how my expectations of an easy job were so far off the mark.

I had already removed the passenger seat at this point, and was amazed at the thick layers of dust, dust and more dust that covered everything.  The cabin had 1/4" foam installed in it to provide some modicum of sound insulation, as well as some padding (not much) for its passengers.  However this foam was ancient (most likely just as old as the vehicle, so over forty!) and was completely worn through in several locations, such as the foot wells on both the driver and passenger sides.  So I figured I would rip it all out and replace it.  I mean, how hard could it be, right?

Correct answer:  Extremely.

Making progress now!

At first I just tried pulling up on the foam, but as you might expect, I was rewarded with only little bits of foam ripped off in my hands for my efforts.  As it aged, the foam became brittle and more prone to ripping - at least the top part did.  The bottom part had become one with whatever crazy military grade adhesive they stuck it to the floor with.  Undaunted, I got out a large scraper and started jamming it under the foam, shoving with all of my might to scrape it clear of the metal underneath.  Work was super slow, and I quickly realized the little cheesy scraper I was using wasn't going to cut it, both literally and figuratively.  I popped out to the local hardware store and bought a heavy duty scraper, and some acetone.  Returning rearmed, I had another go at it.

This time I made more progress, and was able to get most of the foam out of the passenger foot well where I had been working.  It had easily been over and hour or two, and I had barely cleared one small section.  Additionally the section that I had scraped clear still had a thin layer of ancient adhesive with foam stubble on it, looking for all the world like some scraggly ass beard a teenage troll might try to grow on his sixteenth birthday.  Improvising, I decided to try to simply sand the hell out of it and see if it worked.  Pulling out my trusty orbital sander, I got down to work.  After a few minutes noisy sanding, I had penetrated the nasty layer of glue and stubble, and had nice clean bare metal beneath it!

Now that I was down in it, I started to see little bits of rust here and there, especially in the cracks where the foam had come up a bit over the years.  I blew everything out with my air compressor as best I could, and then applied some of the miracle fluid, Loctite Extend and let it dry.  Once it had I grabbed my can of rust resistant grey primer and coated the now rust free areas in a protective layer of paint.  I also spray painted the freshly bare passenger foot well as well.

One prepped passenger foot well ready!

Now that I had a system worked out, I attacked the other major problem spot, the driver side foot well.  This time I added a step where I first soaked the foam in a little bit of acetone before proceeding with the heavy duty scraper.  This helped A LOT, and I started to make some real progress.  It was at this point where I recognized that it was possible to keep a layer of the more heavy duty paint (looks like bed liner paint perhaps) that the army had coated the floor in if I was real careful in how I scraped and then sanded.  So, with a little more delicacy (as much as you can have grunting, pushing and shoving a bladed spatula under resistant ancient foam) I was able to salvage some of the original protective paint and not take it down to metal.  I finished up by spray painting the driver's side foot well with primer as well.  Was looking pretty good!

At this point it was getting late, I had been at it for hours and hours, and I had barely managed to clean and prep to small areas.  Looking around at the rest of the cabin interior, I started to reassess my overall strategy for what I was doing.  I hadn't received my sound insulation yet ( had purchased some DynaMat on Amazon) and I was now having thoughts along the lines of "Perhaps I can just leave a lot of this old foam in place where it's not so bad and put additional insulation over it..."  More next post on why THAT particular idea didn't work, and why the next weekend's worth of work felt a lot like spinning my wheels in place and going no where.  Fun fun fun!

As usual, thanks for reading along, and I will try to have the next post out as quickly as possible!

God, that took a lot of work...