Jef and I drove down to San Diego to spend the weekend with his parents, where we’ve taken full advantage of the space, tools, and easily accessible electricity. We spent the day going to battle once again with those seat rails, felling them one by one.
I’m way too tired to write out a flowery description of the events that transpired today. In summary, we rented an air compressor so we could run the plasma cutter than my awesome uncle let me borrow. We tried using the plasma cutter at 120 V to cut through the rails, but it wasn’t cutting as easily as we’d hoped it would. Assuming it was a voltage issue, we ran all over town looking for a 240 V extension cord, and finally borrowed one from a friend. It still didn’t like a knife through butter, but I proceeded to blast away at whatever I could, while Jef attacked from underneath the van, removing as many nuts as he could.
Miracle of miracles, Jef was able to remove the nuts from TWO of the rails. How, I will never know. I took a look at them a while ago, and deemed the task impossible. (To be fair, I never got the chance to thoroughly inspect the entire underside of the van on level ground, and away from a dangerously busy Glendale street). This leaves one lone rail to be removed using an undetermined method (whose nuts really are completely hidden by aluminum panels), and a bunch of holes in the floor of the van.
I’ve been contemplating the best method for plugging the holes, and I’ve come to the realization that since there are so many, I might as well take the opportunity to experiment with all the different methods and see which one I like best. Removing the seat rails has turned out to be one of the most haphazard tasks I have ever endeavored to accomplish. Why not finish the job in the same manner? Consistently haphazard. Nice.
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