ABANDONED Dodge Challenger Rescued After 35 Years Part 5 How Rusty Is It

So in the last video of the Abandoned Challenger, we got our front suspension and brakes bolted in as well as tear down that original 318. In this video, we're going to tear in to our interior, really assess the damage as far as what 35 years of sitting will do to you. So all this carpet, all these seats, everything's going to come out. Now previously, we did take out the back seat in order for us to unlock the trunk, which as you can see right here, I took out the old trunk lock so we can access it. Just for you guys, we may pressure wash this car in this video. You still see there's some stuff growing on it. I think we can really clean this thing up. I know we should have done that first, but at first I wasn't going to pressure wash it, but now I think I want to. So let's do it. I think our first step here is to empty out the trunk. I plan to have this entire trash can right over here filled up to the brim with trash and nonsense. So let's get to it. Surprise, I have gloves this time. So let's tear out all this. Somebody was signing me with that. Look at that. Now that's pretty bad if your paint cans or whatever rusted out in the process. Tennis balls. It can rust. It was a metal can. Look at that. That's pretty sad if it's in the trunk and it rusts. I don't know what that is. I want to know. Conoco antifreeze. Sorry, but we don't need you. Gum out. Carburetor cleaner. See why they needed that. I don't know what these metal pieces are, but I'll keep them even though they're rusted to the floor mat. This is the drum that we pulled off. We just set it in the trunk. There's our original trunk lock. I got a new one. This is a wing nut that holds our spare in, so we'll keep that. Original hubcap. Original spare. I don't know if the tire is original, but the wheel is at least. It's like a door lock. That's the reason it's out. Maybe they lost the key a long time ago. I don't know what that is. And now for the fun part. I'm going to try and keep all this mess contained the best I can. Some more cans. What is this? Ignition sealer. Don't know what that is. Gum out. This is rubber. Something like that. She's soft over here. So this is a familiar sight. Had the same thing pretty much with the Charger. That's honestly not as bad as the Charger, but very similar. Our trunk extensions are still good. The centerpiece right here, where the trunk floor actually is, is not that good. So if you remember on the Charger, pretty much the whole trunk floor is gone. And I'm assuming that the top of the gas tank is gone as well. So what we can do is vacuum all this out and get a good look at it. But look at how this stuff is just really flaking off really bad. It's just falling apart. I can just pull apart the trunk. And if you remember, I talked about the frame rail being bad in the first episode, and it's that one over there. So when we get the trunk floor pretty much cleaned out, we'll talk about the underside. So upon closer inspection, the floor isn't as bad as I thought it would be. So it's still, regardless to say, it is still very bad. So the center is pretty much where all the the problem area is. On at least this side over here, all that's still solid. Very solid actually. Over here, not so much. We do have these issues over here. Stay. Pencil. Let's get that other seat out and we'll start ripping carpet. All right, let's tear some of this carpet out. We're just trying to figure out what the floor pan looks like so we can start getting some sheet metal here. It doesn't necessarily matter if we get all the carpet out right now. Wow. So these back floor pans look pretty good. I'm going to clean those up, spray something on it to keep them from rusting anymore. But I think it will be okay. We're using these rear ones. It looks like under the seat will probably be okay too, but I need to vacuum it out. A little pressure time. I just want to see what the floor pans look like so I can start ordering things. So yeah, I know I'm rushing, but it's okay. So typically on a job like this, when you're removing carpet, you typically would, you know, remove the center console and everything around it to get to the carpet. And I didn't only because I was in a hurry to put it in order for some floor pans, so all I needed to figure out in the last few clips was, hey, how are my floor pans? Now that I've ripped up the carpet, because I'm going to replace it anyway, so it didn't hurt if it was ruined or whatnot. But now that we figured that out, I can actually remove the rest of the carpet. So heads up, just whenever you're doing something like this, just remove the center console because it does make things easier. But like I said, I was trying to fly through it and get it done. So I went to pull down the headliner and this is what happens. This is all stored up in there. So even if I did vacuum all this out, stuff would just fall back on the floor. So I ripped the headliner out. Now let's just redo all our vacuum again. Well, it's pouring down rain now, so that's great. So let's just take a look inside the car and see what we got. So honestly, I'm pretty surprised by how well this floor pan looks. Check out the passenger side. It's honestly reusable and I'm going to reuse it. I plan to. We'll just clean it up and get the rust off the surface and then put something on it to keep it from rusting anymore. But honestly, that floor pan's usable just as is. Now the driver's side, not the same story. We'll have to replace the front pan. You can see it is rusty and the rear pan as well had to be replaced. Now half of it's good, but this half right here you can see there's a hole in it. And then the seat pan, where the back seat sits, got some rust right here and then it's the same story on the other side. But honestly, not as bad as I was expecting. It's really usable and if you want to just patch it like it was, put something layered over it, you could. But we're going to fix it right. We're going to put new floor pans in it, make it look a lot better. So I kept all the paperwork that I found as I was cleaning it out and so far I've found some registration here. This is from 1976. Got some registration from 76 when the car was basically new. We've got just some more registrations here. Got a lot of those Nashville points of interest. McDonald's, hey, not a bad place to go, right? We've also got some flyers for the Sequatchie Valley, Fall Creek Falls, pretty cool place if you've never been. Valuable papers, more stuff like that. We got stacks of registration all throughout. There's a dime throughout the years of the car being issued. Registration, registration, more registration. What is this? A parking permit. For Circle Park at University of Tennessee in Knoxville. A Great Smoky Mountains brochure. So this car has been all over the place. But what I thought was the coolest little thing that I found was this little brochure right here. It said, did you forget something? It's a Dodge, the original customer information. Check this out. Let's open this. Look at that. That is pristine. It's still in the original plastic wrapping. I'm going to keep that. The inside, look at that. Aftermarket antennas, your radios, your air conditioning, speakers, all that good stuff. This is an awesome brochure. Check that out. Roof racks, license plates, floor mats, clocks, all for $73,000. I'm going to keep this and put it up safe because that's something that's really awesome to have with the car. So this was also laying in the floorboard in the back. I showed it in the very first video but I still think it's really interesting. So it was last tagged in September 1984 and this is how I determined that this car has been sitting for 35 years. It's been off the road for at least 35 because that was the last time it was tagged. So pretty neat little tag. I'm going to keep this thing. We'll probably put it on display with the car, maybe put it on the front or something just to keep it. We'll clean it up or we might even leave it dirty. I don't know. We might try to straighten out these dents and figure out a few things on it. But it looks pretty cool and I love the fact that it's all there with it. Just to show you how the quality of the factory did stuff, look at all this seam sealer that they just threw on right here. That's all factory right there. This is the seam between the body panels and they just rolled it on. I think it's pretty interesting to see that. But look at this. This piece of wire is from welding wire. It was just hanging here so they didn't care. I mean you can see how quickly they were trying to throw this stuff together. This is some wire that was just sitting here under this seam sealer. I'm like man that just goes to show you how fast they were trying to throw these cars together running down a line. This is our broadcast sheet that they stick under the seat on the factory. There's a spider. This pretty much tells you all the stuff that the fender tag does. Trying to get it out without ripping it too bad. It's easier said than done. Ripped it just a little bit. That's okay. All right. Be very delicate with this. We'll take this inside. Put it somewhere safe. I originally didn't plan to pressure wash this car. I wanted it to wear the mold and all the stuff on it just like it is. You guys asked. I'm going to deliver. Let's pressure wash this thing. So yesterday it got dark and then it actually rained last night. So the car is just a little bit wet but you get the idea of how it looks all cleaned up now. There's a few spots I want to go back over and honestly there may be a few things that I go over and wet sand. Like right here where the old paint was. Still a little rough so I might actually wet sand that and try to bring some of the original color back. But you can see the car I can't tell if it's very noticeable but it is cleaner surprisingly. No it doesn't look it but it is cleaner. Go over here. This is the straighter side of the two. Now inside we've got all the floors clean. So you can see why we took the carpet out because when it rains gets water in the carpet and now it'll dry. So that's a lot easier and you can kind of see that the water kind of falls back into where it was and you can see where it was rusting. But the this side is actually solid so we'll be able to reuse it. I'll probably just take something and go over it paint it keep it from rusting anymore. Put our seats back in and it looks really good. Clean up our center console and this is a side that we will have to clean up and replace. Same thing with the rear and under the seats they'll need to be replaced as well. But the car will look a lot better with all the trash and carpet that was in it out of the car. Then we'll replace all that. Replace the carpet. Do all the interior work. We'll get a new headliner for it and we'll work from there. And honestly I'm excited now because it's not it's really not as bad as I thought it would be. I thought it would be a lot worse because these floor pans are pretty easy to replace and I'll go through it all step by step. We'll fix it all. Make it look really nice. What is that? This is weird. I just I literally just noticed this. That's it okay. So I wonder if this is like a part number or something. So look this is a five seven one. What does that mean? Is this some kind of like a tag on the body like some grease paint that they added to it as it went down the assembly line? That's I had not noticed that until just now. Go back in the clips and you'll be able to see that. But I honestly have never noticed that before. So I'm glad that this floor panel is going to be able to be used because I want to retain that. That's really cool. So looking under the car our biggest issue for rust replacement is going to be this right rear frame rail. Check out that. So we will have to actually take that out and repair it. That's nothing we can't do. We can definitely do that. The rest of the car is fairly solid. Trunk floor is a little rusty as you saw earlier. But it's honestly nothing we can't do. So we had a pretty good day today. We had a lot of stuff done. Figured out what we need to replace. We cleaned out everything. We got the trunk cleaned out. We got the carpet removed. Found a bunch of really cool documents that really pertain to the history of the car and also got the bill sheet out of the back seat. So we'll preserve all of that and put it up in a safe place and maybe we'll come back and look at it one day. So now we kind of know where we want to go as far as rust replacement. Passenger side is okay. Driver side not so much as far as floor pans are concerned. We'll have to replace the rear trunk pan as well as the right rear frame rail. That's okay. It's nothing we can't do. We don't need to get overwhelmed. Don't need to get stressed out about it. We can make it happen. I'm going to show you how we're doing it. In the next episode we're going to tackle the front braking system as far as brake lines and a master cylinder are concerned. I want to knock out everything mechanically up front before we really tackle the rear because the car has been down for a pretty good while. So thanks again for watching. If you like the video please leave a like down below. If you have any questions for me feel free to leave a comment. You can also send me an email. It's at the very end of the video. Send your projects to that same email. Order your t-shirts and your stickers. This is the last video I'm going to talk about the It's Straight Besides the Dents t-shirt order. 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Look forward to next week when we talk about some bright stuff and I'll see you in the next one.