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May 14, 2020


Floors

Many, if not all British cars of this era are notorious rusters.  Rust is the bane of restorers, and any British car of much age will have plenty of it unless it's been exceptionally well cared for in a dry climate.  Parts of the car closest to the ground are the most vulnerable, and the floors have the double threat of road splash from below, and wet carpets from above.

When I started this project, I assumed it likely that I'd be replacing the floors.  To see what was what, I dragged the car out for a nice blast of the bottomside.




Cleaning all the rust and other foreign material down to the metal gives a much better picture of what rust damage is present.  I did the passenger side first.




To my surprise, the rearmost part of the floor, under the seats, looked remarkably good.




But the forward part, in the footwell, not so much.




I took out the cross member to have a look under it.  It was not good.  There were rust holes and animal nests.




So then it was time to step back and decide what to do.  Full floor pans are available for this car, and they look like decent quality pressed parts, but it seemed a waste to replace the two-thirds of my pan that was good.  It also seemed a waste to buy the full pans and only use the front parts.  I also found a few places that offered just the front pans, but instead of being pressed, they appeared to be made on a bead roller, and weren't a very good reproduction of the original.

In the end, I decided to try to rebuild the front pans.  If I failed, I at least had a couple of fall-back options.

To get access to the full floor, the sill had to come off.    This wasn't a big deal, since I knew they had to be replaced, too.  The first pic is what they looked like after I removed my '80s repairs.  Removing them revealed more rust carnage.




My mission was clear.




The complication in fixing the rusty floor is that it is full of formed channels.  A half-round channel runs fore-aft, and four shallower flat-bottom channels connect to it from each side.  I'm not sure of the purpose of the channels.  They are stiffeners, certainly, but they also appear to be drainage channels to lead water to a basin under the seat.  On one side, a wiring cable runs in the round channel.Most of the rust was in these channels.

I dove in near the front, cutting out a rust-through area, and replacing it with a patch.  I have a cheap Harbor Freight bead roller that helped with the step.




Some of the other patches would require replacing entire channels.  I played with the bead roller and couldn't seem to get consistently well-shaped channels, so I took some time and made this custom set of rollers that make a pretty good facsimile of the channel shape.




I tried it out on one of the bad channels.




Well, this seemed like a good solution for the flat channels, but didn't help for the round one.  I made this shape by forcing some metal into a slot with a round bar.




Cut out the old round channel and put in my new one.




This was a pretty large patch under the cross member.  This area is not included in the commercially available front pans.




Some of the remaining channels had to end in the panel.  The bead roller doesn't do that very well.




But this little makeshift press puts a nicer end on the channels.




So finally, all of the new channel patches got tacked in.




But one more important feature remained.  The floors have a flange dropped vertically on their outboard edges.  This is where the sills attach at the bottom.  That flange was mostly missing.




So I cut out what remained of it, and cut back to solid metal on the floor surface, and tacked in a new flange.




Going rearward from there, though the rest of the floor pan was in good shape, the vertical flange was not.  To replace it, the inner sill had to be removed.




And then the bad flange.




There was a bad rust area around a welded in nut at the rear.  I think it is a seat belt attachment point.




The new flange and a new nut plate for the seat belt.




One more blast to clean up the heat discoloring, and it looks pretty OK.  The drivers side (at the bottom) just got it's initial inspection blast.  No work done on that side yet.




Inside looks presentable, too.  There's no paint or primer on either side of the floor--just freshly blasted.




Here's the small pile of fine British steel that came out of the floor and environs.




Now, on to the other side, which looks too be in similar shape.


For a commercial car restoration enterprise, this approach to the project may not make any sense.  There is too much time involved.  But for a hobbyist, it might be reasonable to consider it.  Certainly the price is right--just some consumables.

Comments to Ed at elhollin1@yahoo.com

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