The Esprit has it.
Oh, you think you KNOW how rusty it is, based off the pictures of the missing floors.... but while I was underneath trying to remove the bumper bolts (why? they were attached to basically nothing except more rust) I took these:
^this is the GOOD part of the frame rail, mind you.
The only reason the trunk isn’t rotted here is because the gas tank protected it.
Lets look a little farther up the frame rails on both sides, shall we?
See how the frame rail curves downward over the axle, next to the leaf spring? Yeah between that and the nicely rust-proofed black seat pan is supposed to be a frame rail. Its more of a frame FAIL at this point, as you can see up into the car through it.
And yes, its a LOT worse on the driver’s side.
The body hides it well.
I started out the process just removing the tail lights and spoiler, but when I found the reason why the right tail light didn’t work when I had it running that one day...
That brown wire was pinched between the bumper bar mounting bracket and the tail panel... I knew the car had been repainted back there because of the UNLEADED FUEL ONLY decal being covered, but didn’t know the bumper had been OFF the car. Maybe that’s why the absorber under there was so new looking...
Anyways, to get the harness out I unbolted the top bolts inside the trunk, then the four UNDER the car which were not coming out... not that there was much metal holding onto them anyways.
Some ‘persuading’ (standing on the bumper and jumping a bit) broke it free quite easily.
Leaving piles of rust dust in its wake.
With that done, and the tail stripped of usable bits, I went back to pulling the wiring under the dash and the HVAC box...
But to get to some of that I had to remove some panels, and those panels are behind things like the parking brake, and the nuts for that are waaaayyyy down there between the brake booster and the fender on the bottom right. Hmm.... about that fender...
There, MUCH more room for activities. And I only had to slice off the front two bolts where they attach to the bottom of the core support, because rust and broken captive nuts. The fender and core support are junk anyways, so no biggie taking the sawzall to them.
Now those parking brake mounting nuts, and the main harness connector were a breeze to get to.
I have to do the same thing on the other side to get to the HVAC box mounting nuts, so that fender gets to wait for another day.