Why Are There So Many Pine Needles?

Well, the explanation for that is actually pretty simple. It's a 1991 and the guy who owned it before me parked it under a pine tree. Still, it's something that went through my mind more and more as I kept pulling increasingly large tufts of pine needles out of my front grill...

It started innocently enough: I saw some trapped pine needles in the raintray, and figured it might not be a bad idea to clean it out.

There were two types of screws holding the grill on, a torx screw and a hex bolt. At first, I tried to just undo the hex bolts and see if that would be enough. My hands are pretty small, so I thought I might be able to just slip through the gap at the bottom and grab the needles that way. Well, my hands weren't *quite* small enough. I was able to poke the needles with my fingertips, which was enough to tell me that the depth of the pine needles was far greater than I had imagined, but didn't have enough clearance to grab them and pull them through. So, I ended up having to take off the front grill entirely.

Taken off, entirely.

I started removing the needles.

SO MANY NEEDLES...

I broke out the ruler for a prize shot. The bottom most layer was honestly more like dirt than anything else. Maybe I should have planted a garden down in there instead...

I also discovered that the top had gotten nicked when drilling through the firewall to run a charging cable from the alternator. Oops. The windshield wipers were squeaking badly, so I sprayed them with some lubricant.

The needles had trapped moisture against the firewall. Apparently, it did so in such quantities that the poor thing had rusted through so badly that you could poke your finger through to the engine compartment from the front passenger seat.

My friend, who had been working on his car listening to me doing all this, saw the gap and said he had just the thing. Flashing tape! To prepare, I rinsed out the raintray and hit it with some rustoleum.

Then we stuck the tape in place and used a heat gun to help mold it/adhere it. We did this to the nick in the firewall from the alternator run, too.

It stayed in place really well.

Results

No more pine needles! Hurray.