Alright fellas, time for the first real update in 5 years.
Hope y’all like fabrication pictures ‘cause that’s all I’ve got for ya, and a lot of them at that. Gotta do a bit of a photo dump here to bring everyone up to speed and free up some space on the phone.
So after finishing up cleaning the car and polishing the wheels, I was finally ready to do some real work. The main priority for this year is to get rid of the Flintstone car thing I’ve got going on with the floors. Here’s a look at the state of things before I started:
As you can see, it’s obviously missing the transmission tunnel, and I’ve got a hole on the passenger side near the inner rocker panel. The transmission tunnel will get addressed, but priorities dictate that the hole near the rocker get fixed first. The hole was made by me when it came time to lower the body back down on the boxed frame.
I had raised the transmission crossmember to get the driveline and U-joint angles right, but this created interference with the floor. At the time it was “just cut out whatever’s in the way” and we’ll worry about it later, well now is “later”.
As a solution, I decided to make some simple boxed pieces that will cover the crossmember, essentially channeling the body around it.
Easy right?
Not quite. The major hurdle other than matching the floor contours to the new boxed sections is that this is also where the front seat mounts are. Gonna have to get creative here. Here’s the start to notch the boxed section under the front outer seat mount:
Cut the floor over top of the crossmember, and drop the boxed section in:
Here you can see how and why this part of it had to be notched and dropped a bit:
Fitting pretty good so far, time to weld it up and finish it out:
Next, I had to make a piece that will close in the edge of the seat mount. Out came the Eastwood shrinker/stretcher, and this is what I came up with…
…it’ll sit in here like this, and get fully welded in to the mount edge towards the end:
With that coming along nicely, I had to turn my attention to the inner front mount. The mount itself had to be re-bent and reshaped to sit in its new home, this is what I ultimately ended up with after a couple of hours of work:
Then of course, the inside edge of the boxed section had to be rolled to match the existing curvature into the transmission tunnel.
After multiple test fits and mock-ups, I was 100% confident in its location to burn it in permanently.
Pretty ugly, but after a little cleanup…
Much better.
All this work was in preparation for cutting and removing the outer front mount to close in the holes underneath it. I wanted a minimum of 3 seat mounts in place at any one time so that the seat base would always fit properly, so again this dictated the order that things had to be done in.
So, back to the outer mount. Punched some spot weld holes in my little bent and stretched piece, then marked its location and burned it in to the boxed section too.
Getting lost yet? As you can see this is a lot more complicated than it would first appear. I equate it to building a 200 piece jigsaw puzzle, but you’ve gotta make all your own pieces.
Oh, and there’s no picture on the box to go by either.
Lol
Time to cut the outer front mount off/out, again to get access to underneath it. This is where things got a little ugly temporarily:
Not to fear, you outta know I’ve got this. Old damaged areas cut out and new patches made:
Of course I’m skipping over quite a bit, all the welding and grinding mostly. You guys get to see the nice clean finished product. Next was to cut out a hole in the flat portion of the floor to get rid of the torn spot weld holes.
So wait, what? You’re filling small holes by making one bigger one? Yep. Sometimes it’s easier.
Although it looks like a pretty basic piece to make, it actually turned out to be quite complicated. After a couple of attempts, this is the shape of the patch that’s needed:
Even this template wasn’t perfect, note in the next picture that I had to tape another small piece on. Here is the template mocked up in position:
Making a little more sense now? The idea is to get as many of the smaller pieces made and welded onto the boxed section as possible, so that it will almost literally drop in place for final welding.
Cardboard template transferred to metal, cut out and bent, and mocked into place:
And then welded to the boxed section, metal finished out, and set in place for fitment verification:
Success! I know it doesn’t seem like it yet, but this was a pretty major milestone to achieve last night. It means this area is done and ready to weld in.
Now I have to work on blending the existing floor into the boxed section, and that’s going to take a bit of work too. Stay tuned for that.
And when this side is done, I get to repeat this whole process over again on the driver’s side! It shouldn’t be as bad tho, less damage, and the floor is flatter on that side. No catalytic converter hump to contend with over there.
Thanks for hanging in there through this long post, till next time friends.
D.
www.mcmaster.com
