Alright. Another update. The chassis will be fine. Christ, I don't want to spend 1500 bucks on a car that i'm going to be cutting the transmission tunnel out of anyway (more on that later).
First off: the oil pan.
I used a roll form 1" NPT tap. This tap actually requires a larger hole because it actually forms the material vs cutting it. Since my holes were slightly large as it were, this worked out well. I purchased two 1" NPT socket head pipe plugs in t-356 aluminum. (the same material the pan is made from). I then coated the plugs in high temp, oil reisitant epoxy and threaded them into the holes. I tightened them with a 1/2" breaker bar. Since both items are of the same material, both will exhibit similar heat expansion.
Problem solved.
The pan with the plugs installed:
The pan on the engine:
Next up, the body rot.
There appear to be four locations. They all seem like relatively easy fixes. Just need to cut out the bad parts and weld in new metal. I have acces to both metal and welders, should not be a big problem. The only portion of the rot the is structural is on the strut tower, shown here:
Here is the rust in the battery tray:
Here is the rust under the carpet:
I am not a body guy, but the rest of the car is pretty clean. Quite frankly, since no mater what shell i get i am painting, I don't see the point in spending another 500+ dollars when i can simply fix up the minor problems with this one... A week of diy chassis work > spending $500 that can be put toward management.
We pulled the dash out and the rest of the stuff from the enginebay. I will say this, the way this fucking car is put together is retarded. The wiring is absurd. Any Jap car i've worked on of the same era has always been much more organized and well-thought-out. Now i can have a better reason to hate on euros...
Looks pretty clean to me... aside from all the grease.
Now here are the pictures of things to come...
Don't get your hopes up, what we've done here is simply set the engine on the x-member and support it with a jack (yay for strong cast oil pan). The front of the motor is at the proper height. The rear of the engine will need to come up about 1/2". The shifter sits about 1.5" back from the center of the stock hole... Close enough for me.
More pictures:
