Flintstone floor
I’d hoped that, by the time I sat down to write this diary, the Landcrab would be back in one piece and my fears about the condition of the floor wouldn’t have materialised. But, sadly, everything I’d suspected when I started to dig into the dodgy old repairs uncovered last month has proved to be true.
Further prodding with a screwdriver soon showed that the rot wasn’t limited to the floor/subframe, but the front end of the sill was also in need of serious attention. What has made the task more difficult is that I’m not dealing with rusted out factory panels, but layer upon layer of old repairs, no doubt put in place to get the car through an MoT at some point. I’m happy making my own repair panels, but when you’ve got no idea what the originals looked like or how they fitted together, it’s more like a challenge for the Time Team – scraping your way down through layers of history – than the home mechanic.
From inside the car, the floor looked quite sound, other than a small hole about the size of a 20p coin beneath the clutch pedal. Using a fine cutting disc, I enlarged this to the size of a playing card. It was then patently obvious that the whole section of floor was in fact a patchwork of small repairs and, by the time I laid down the angle grinder again, the floor was gone from transmission tunnel to sill. Thankfully the inner sill and central membrane have proved to be solid, but while cleaning up the outer sill – again, an earlier repair – the scraper went
The front end of the sill was also in need of serious attention
straight through.
The angle grinder was brought into play again, and I’d reached a point halfway along the driver’s door before sound metal was reached. The jacking point is surprisingly the original, but the frilly lower edge has been cut away and will be replaced.
With everything cleaned back, it was time to start thinking about making up some repair sections. Creating a suitable template was going to be tricky, particularly for the now almost non-existent subframe-type structure, but thankfully the nearside of car is in much better condition. Using my favourite Blue Peter-esque paper template method, I crawled underneath the car and traced around the sound substructure, cut out the basic shape and then flipped it over for a mirror image. It’s always worth leaving a bit of surplus material around the template to allow for trimming and bending. Constructing the substructure required the use of some heavier plate. This is more difficult to cut, and I used a cutting disc as opposed to snips, although it was surprisingly easy to bend and shape into its final form over the bench vice.
The lighter weight sections have been cut from an old van side repair panel I rescued from a neighbouring business’ scrap bin (with permission, of course.) This not only gives me a large sheet of body weight steel, but with a bit of thought, the pre-formed returns and swage lines can also be used to mimic original features in the panels being replaced. In this case, the recesses in the footwell.
With the exception of a few small parts – most notably a couple of fillet panels that go underneath the footwell panel – I’m ready to start welding the car back together. I reckon I’d better stock up on welding wire and prepare myself for a good old Morris weldathon…