Sunday, February 27, 2011

Floor Pans...

The floor pans in the car were comletely rusted through from the firewall to driver front pan.  So, this will detail the process I went through to replace it. 

First I went to the local Mustang restoration shop and picked up a replacement Dynacorn floor pan.  The stamping is perfect, and a little longer on the firewall side to ease in fit.  First, I layed the new pan in place and sat a cylinder head on top to weight it down.  Then I used some black spray paint (the interior color is white) th mark off where the new pan will go.  After the paint dried, I masked it off with masking tape to get a good clean edge so I could cut it out.  I cut it out with a pneumatic cutoff tool and 3M green corps cutoff wheel.  The 3M wheel lasted for the whole cut.  I drilled out the spot welds with a 3/8" drill bit, the loosened them up with a chisel, once the pan was coming out.













Once the pan was out I layed it on top of the new pan and used some red spray paint to mark the spot weld holes for the new ones.  Then I used the same 3/8" bit to drill out the holes.















The new pan layed in the hole perfectly, I left about 1/2" overlap of old metal to give me a base for the stitch welding.  I tacked in the corners with .030 flux core welding wire using the Hobart 125EZ Flux Core MIG welder, then I started stitch about 1" apart all the way around the pan.  After I finished the stitch, I started filling in the spot welds, using a rosette technique.  Once the welding was done, I grinded down the welds and used a 3M seam sealer to finish off the seams.




After the seam sealer cured for 2 hours, I sprayed the firewall and floors with a red oxide caoting and allowed them to dry for an hour, then finished the job up with fith a coating of semi-flat black on all surfaces.  Looks good as new and hopefully will last another 45 years.


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