Right after he left I pulled the seats and floormat out of the truck and started measuring for the adapters I was going to make for the new seats. While laying on the floor in the truck I noticed quite a few spots that had small blisters in the paint. Digging into one I found surface rust from the factory spot welds, the welds burned off the galvanizing allowing the metal to rust, so I decided to sand down the floor and clean up the spots before they actually got bad.
The drivers door sill was the worst, some of it was due to snow melting from my shoes and running into the sill under a wire guiide. It was all surface rust but took a couple hours to clean up because of all the nooks.
The rest of the floor took a couple hours to take out the bad spots and rough up what was left.
After I wiped it down with some grease remover, Tania helped me paint it with POR15.
I had a pint that I had bought 15 years ago and never used because it was gloss. I emailed the company that makes it and they said it should be fine because it had never been opened. This paint is perfect for this type of thing and as you can see even brushed on it flows very smooth with no brush strokes visible. In Indiana this would have taken close to two days to dry due to the humidity, here I could sit back on the floor in just over an hour. After it had dried I also changed both door seals, now the doors feel like they did when the truck was brand new.
I had not planned on doing this to the floor so I ran out of time last weekend and had no choice but to toss in the original bench seat so I could drive the truck to work.
Today I was able to fab up the brackets for the drivers side seat. I did not want to drill any holes in the floor pan to mount them and they were wider than the buckets that were in the truck. I was able to use the original mount holes in the lower bracket and tie the upper bracket into the seatbelt mount. This will work well for running brackets over the center hump for the jump seat. When its all done all three seats will be mounted to one bracket.
The seat fits well for someone my size to move it any further back I will need to do something with the grab handle on the back of the seat. I also purchased new armrests for the door panels to replace the originals which were shot. I have not decided what I am going to do with the door panels yet. I will most likely change some of the interior pieces to grey to tie the seats in. I am still deciding which pieces and how much. I am ordering some dark grey carpet and will put it in after I am finished with the seat adapters.
