This is Justin's car. After helping me work on mine, he got the Fiat yen, and eventually saw this one on Ebay, sitting in a field in Oklahoma. He won the auction, luckily not paying too much for it, and we drove up one Saturday and towed it back. As soon as we got it in the garage, one of the trailing arms dropped off. We found that the entire floor - and I mean entire - had rusted out. But there was little or no rust anywhere else. The convertible top had been fairly new when the car was parked, but over the years (five or six) the rear window dropped out and let about two inches of water sit in the bottom of the car, which mostly disintegrated.

After taking out some of the interior, and whacking at the rust with a DeWalt reciprocating saw, we discussed whether it was worth saving. The odometer read 62,000 miles, and after examining the car some, I started to wonder if that was all the mileage it had on it. The pedal pads were worn just a little, the seats were filthy but completely without tears, there were no scratches around the keyways, and the wheels weren't banged up. Except for the rust, the car looked like it really hadn't been driven much. I fooled around with the engine - changed the timing belt and tensioner, and with some help from the Mirafiori forum, I figured out how to adjust the points, and tried to start the car again. It sputtered a few times, spat a large amount of smoke and debris out the rear, and then caught, and ran for the first time in a good long while. It ran perfectly (or as perfectly as possible given that we had taken out the gas tank and I had just poured a cupful of gas in the carburetor). That did it- we decided to save it.

Justin has done a heroic amount of work on this car, and it's actually starting to look like we might save it.

The floor was more or less entirely rusted away, all the way back to the rear frame members.

We cut it all out, ground down the nubs, and replaced it with the floor cut out of the blue Spider.