Dave Did you take a course on body work? If not you are talented. I admire you!
That's quite a compliment and I appreciate that.
But I am envious of the guy that can just buy one finished or pay someone to do what I'm doing lol!
I didn't put any words with the mobile phone uploads I posted yesterday.
So I'll try to explain a little this morning.
You can see the large floor piece removed from the driver's side. There's a crossmember and a forward frame rail under the floor pan in that area along with a couple of splash shields just behind the firewall to toe board seam. The floor pan was joined to all of this under structure at the Lynch Road Chrysler plant in MI in 1969.
They used spot welds at the factory, and when you take this stuff apart you need to split those spot welds and peel this stuff apart. Most welds I drill, some I just split with a chisel on an air hammer. Then I drill the overlying panel and plug weld where the factory spot welds used to be.
I decided to do a puzzle fit butt weld on these patches so that when it is finished there will be no visible seams from under the car. the longest seam to weld goes from the rocker to the trans tunnel. I was able to place that seam directly on top of the crossmember weld flange so the seam is completely hidden from the underside of the car.
The pan turned out really well, I painted the insides of the frame structure before putting the new pan on.
The passenger side needed a small patch, this is the rectangular 4"x6" patch I showed in the pictures. Again I went for a puzzle piece fit with butt welds. The patch was also right over the forward frame rail so I needed to drill and plug weld where it was originally spot welded from the factory.
After the welding was done Pam helped me scrape a bunch of old undercoating off the top side of the floor pans and I brushed on a rust encapsulating paint from eastwood. I like this stuff because I can brush it into all the factory seams and let it creep into the seam before putting new seam sealer back in.
I�m really glad to be done with the floor, now I need to cut a bad area out of the driver�s side rocker and repair with new metal, and I need to weld the sub frame connectors into place. They will help to stiffen up the car and reduce twist/flex which causes cracks in these bodies over time.
That twisting increases over time as some of the body panels rust out. With this late 60�s B-body having all those areas restored to original condition it is going to be a nice stout body/chassis once again.
God I am sore and tired, that was a lot of damn work for the little that got done.
