With my floor pans prepped and ready to go, I started off this session with the welding of the front seat floor pan. Once I got both ends welded in good I was able to do the final fitting of the intermediate floor pan. I started off with tack welds in random spots to get the pan where I wanted it to be before doing the longer welds to close the whole pan in. Unlike the left side intermediate floor pan that is an actual replacement floor pan, this piece of scrap sheet metal is thinner and by default, more flexible. More on the flexibility in a moment. With the cuts of metal that I did, and the minor cuts at different points on the scrap piece, I was able to weld the entire piece in place almost seamlessly, with no need to add any extra pieces of metal to fill any gaps. On the outer front corner the metal wasn't perfectly ground down so the welds were a little shitty in comparison to the other areas so we ended up with more of the dreaded popcorn welds. Of course this problem is more prevalent with flux core welders but we have to work with what we have. Now about that flexibility. Because of the thin sheet metal, the intermediate floor pan has the issue of flexibility, with the pan acting in the same way a speaker cone acts when it resonates sound. If unchecked, this pan would vibrate excessively, making the interior of the car noisy, which is already going to be an "issue" with the engine and exhaust system. I had to come up with a crude solution to this problem. My solution was to cut a piece of flat stock iron and weld it across the middle of the floor pan from the driveshaft/transmission hump across to the inner rocker panel metal. I would then weld the flat stock to the underside of the sheet metal to attach said sheet metal to the flat stock. This would help keep the sheet metal from being able to flex like it did before. With this section of flooring done, our next move is going to be to weld in some angle iron across the backs of the front seat floor pans, going from the inner rocker panel metal across to the driveshaft humps. I was going to use a single piece of angle iron but was unable to find a piece long enough to span the gap across the body so I had to settle for a 4 ft piece of angle iron cut in half, with each half to be welded from the inner rocker panel across to and slightly under the remainder of the driveshaft hump. This will help in strengthening the front seat floor pans as well as add to the overall rigidity of the floors in the car. I also plan to add a couple more 2 ft pieces about a foot back from the front seat pans. These pieces of angle iron will sit over the last two body mounts with an added bolt welded to them to hold the body down at this central point on the floor.
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May 2023
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