Day of Destruction - Engine Battery Rack Prep

Before I get to the destruction, I wanted to show the result of prepping and finishing the metal around the interior of the passenger compartment.  If you go back a bit in time, you'll see that the car was caught in the rain with bare metal exposed in the passenger compartment.  I would have thought Rainbow would have blasted, primed and painted the compartment, but it didn't happen.  I had to scrape off most of the existing rubberized coating to expose the rusty parts.  I then treated it with my magic rusty solution.  I then used about 6 cans of 3M rubberized undercoating spray.  Trust me, a can doesn't go very far.  It's basically thinned tar.  I masked off the area, then sprayed multiple coats and I think the final result looks great.  I've dealt with the rust, and added a temperature stabilization and noise reduction layer.

Now, on to the destruction.  During the tear down, I read the EA directions and it said remove the engine cover release bracket so the engine bay battery rack will fit.  So I unbolted the catch mechanism from the mount welded to the rear of the rear engine firewall.  The car was then painted and now I come to realize, with some advice from the helpful folks on the 914EV forum, that I was meant to remove the mount too, and the hard tube that shepherds the release cable from the passenger compartment!  This was going to be ugly, given the delicate nature of removing a welded metal bracket from a newly painted area.  You can see the tube curving in from the right and attaching to the mount.

The tube is very stiff and tack welded to the frame as it comes out of the passenger compartment, so I decided to cut it off, and I'll pop a small rubber cap on later.

Here's a closeup of the mount we need to remove.  I taped off the areas I was likely to bang into for a little protection.  I had to climb inside the engine compartment to get the proper access.

With the use of a sawzall, jigsaw with a metal blade and angle grinder, the mount is now gone.  I painted it with rust fluid and will prime and paint to match the body later.  It came off better than I thought it would.

I tried a test fitting of the battery rack and immediately found the original 12V battery tray needs to be removed too.  I just missed that in the instructions.

I did manage to remove it, with the help of the tools listed above.  I didn't take an after-picture, so I'll put that up later.  The good thing is when I got the tray out, I found a strip of rust under the horizontal tab of metal you can see welded to the vertical panel.  This would have been a rust farm in the future.  They weren't able to reach it with the blaster and the primer and paint couldn't get up underneath well enough.  I slathered it with rust solution and it's in good shape now.