7/24/2007: Floor Repair, Part 1
I’ve known for a while that I would need to replace some portions of the floor of my car. Most of the rust damage was under the seats, and was rust from the top down. Undercoating protected the bottom quite well, but standing water from a leaky top must have slowly done a job on the top surface of the floor.
I cut out the piece I wanted to replace in several stages over about a week:
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| Seat Rails Removed |
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| A hole! |
Here you can see why I had to cut across the fronts of the seat rails, rather than drilling out the spot welds attaching them to the crossmmeber:
In my case, the seat rails were in need of repair anyway, so I plan on just making new ones later. I took lots of measurements before I cut the old ones out.
You can also see that the bottom of that cross member is pretty rusty and thin- I’ll need to patch that.
At this point you may wonder why I cut that section out- it doesn’t really look that bad! Well, if you look closer, you may be able to see how thin the metal was through much of this section:
Since this is expected to keep my butt off the road, I’d rather make sure it’s solid now!
Making a perfect replacement for this panel is a beyond what I can do with the tools I have. Therefore, I have sent the original panel out to a shop that will hopefully do this for me. I’ll probably have both sides made, since they are mirror images.
I’ll post more later, once I hear back from them. If this works out, the same shop will be able to make more of this panel for anyone who needs one.