Floorpan welding.

The sound of frying bacon was in the air yesterday (or more correctly in a garage) and if you know old cars you'll know that distinctive sound can only mean one thing; a mig welder patching up a hole.

Here's where it all starts, What a great retro interior! But I'm curious, what's the floor like under that carpet?

I'll just lift it, shall I?

Hmmm

OOh what's that?

Maybe I should give it a poke?........ As the screwdriver makes a bid for freedom through the floor pan.

Oh... crap...

So while saving to do the work I removed all of the mats, insulation material and that stuck on bitumen style sound deadening matting from the floor with a wallpaper scraper.  The results of rather a lot of swearing is what you see above, the floor was very solid (ignore the holey bits) under the sound deadening.  It's horrible stuff to remove, basically you have a choice; either get into a sticky mess by warming it up or knock it off on a brisk morning when it's brittle, either way it's a slow job and pings off in little tiny bits with lots of frantic scraping.  Water just creeps under it over time and it hides a multitude of sins.

  

To help the welder I also removed the passenger seat as it was just something else to get in the way.  Doing this helps bring the cost of the welding work down.  Unfortunately I cant weld as I haven't got anywhere to weld and no adequate power supply nearby.  I really need to learn though.  

Ooooh.. solid floorpans!!  They look alright for 40odd year old floors, don't they!

I used some red oxide primer and refitted the bungs in the pan using plumbers mait, it never goes hard and stops water ingress better than silicone I think.

Next job for me is to reapply some seam sealer and paint the floorpans.  I might use Hammerite for this, I've seen a nice Mk1 escort with the floorpans painted in blue, to achieve the shade required he mixed Hammerite blue and white together which looked good.  Either that or I'll use satin black. 

I think when summer arrives (hopefully we'll get something that resembles a summer this year..) I'll miss the cool breeze shooting up my leg as I see the tarmac whizz by through the holes in my rotten floor pans but with a 40 year old Ford I doubt I'll be waiting long..