What the F-F-F-Floor Pans?!?!
Here we are in July. It's been months since I posted and I've been hard at work 6 days a week on the car. I decided to stop posting tear down entries only. I wanted to show some finished work with the tear downs. The problem? I need the lower control arms. Without them there's no point in putting anything steering or suspension back together.
So, I decided to start work on the floor pans. Back when Rob first bought the car he told me they were rusted out. You can feel the breeze around your feet when you drive the car. Here we see the driver side from underneath the car.
The passenger side looked like corrugate tin hammered flat and shoved between the old pan and the sub-frame connector. Turns out it was just cut up floor pan shoved in there. I cut them up to get them out. I'm not sure what they were there for actually. Maybe so whoever installed them could say they were installed?
Elliot and I removed the interior of the car. Here's the WTF moment you've been waiting for.... The floor pans are perfect (mostly). A nice fresh coat of paint that was put on when the body was done! What?
Notice under the pedals the two holes? Those are from the self tapping screws I pulled out. There were 6 on each panel. OK then, somebody just put new panels over the old ones and held them in place with self tappers. Right. I'd cut the old ones out, but you can do this. What went wrong?
The drain plugs are in upside down and weren't painted so they rusted like crazy. Wonderful.
I had no real welding experience, and never did any metal work. We took a couple weeks and read/watched and practiced. It's possible that the left side floor pans were done twice. It was easy to get the repo panels. I also may have learned how the seats from the 2005 Mustang fit after they floors were done and had to cut stuff back out. I did put in the lowered seat mounts so the seats fit. Also had to fabricate where the seats attach to the front slop of the mount instead of the top. No big deal. It was a fun learning this stuff and gave me confidence to try all sorts of things auto related or not.
I was apprehensive about my ability to weld the new metal in securely. Duane Myers encouragement helped here. He had talked to me about just doing what the previous guys had done and not worry about it. What I figured was I couldn't do any worse than what had been done. I have some 3 point seat belts and they are safety rated and use pop rivets in places. I settled on pop rivets to hold the metal in place while we spot welded it every inch or so.
Cut to a month later and we have new floor pans!
