A second look

I pulled the pan out from under the car to see what was going on with the underside-maybe my first look was too quick and there IS a chance I can save the rails of the pan and weld in far less expensive sections vs. entire pan halves.

They did what I've seen more than once...the fuel line got clogged and instead of properly fixing it, someone added a second fuel line to the underside of the car and then screwed it to the tunnel-leaving 10 small screw holes.  I removed that as well-pondering the act of removing the entire bottom portion to get to the tunnel innards and building a jig for the entire pan...I'm going to think on that for a while.

The rear brakes off of the 65 were functional.  They don't look great but they will get rebuilt.

stripped to the bone

Squeaked out some time to clean the pan off-removed everything to get it down to bare bones.  No real time with the wire wheel yet but it still looks okay.  Keeping my fingers crossed.

...and then, I looked up:

Well..not the end of the world, but it still sucks.

A couple of minutes later, I pull out the grinder and a wire wheel-just to see what happens:

...and holes like this start to open up all over the pans...so they're shot.

This is going to be a bit more work than I expected...might be a good time to learn to weld, huh?

the parting of pan and body

With Craig's help, the pan and body were pulled apart without much fanfare...

You'll notice the rear fenders off the 64 on the body...I sold the rear fenders as they were dent-riddled and had about 5# of bondo on each side.

There's also part of a wall I removed in the house at the front of the car...just like the car, the house requires a bit more than I hoped.