No Floor Pan Yet

I spent the morning getting a bit more fitting done on the front half of the floor pan; I'm pretty much sure I'm ready to get everything welded in. After finishing all the fitting, I did a bit more cleanup of the sills/flanges that the floor pan sits on, and I repaired the front inner section of the frame area up in the toeboard area, a simple repair I've been meaning to do for weeks but kept putting off. Then I made sure the inside of the tunnel was nice and clean, and sprayed it with a good coat of cold galvanizing paint (zinc spray paint).

Then I hesitated. Should I start welding in the pan today? What if there were things that I should do inside the tunnel now, while the floor was off, and access was easy? Should I re-run the accelerator rod and other cables? I decided that the accelerator rod was a definite must-do, and I got it down from the parts shelf. Trying to remember which hole it fed into in the back, I quickly remembered that the rubber "buffers" on the little metal brackets it slides through inside the tunnel had long since gotten hard and disintegrated, and had mostly fallen apart upon removal. I made some new buffers out of several layers of duct-tape so that there was no metal-to-metal rubbing and contact between the body and the rod. I then greased them up.

After inserting the rod, I found that there was definite resistance between the rod and the guide areas inside the tunnel it slides through, even with grease. Also, I wasn't so sure about my replacement buffers for the rod. I decided to quit working on the floor pan for the day, ask some questions of the list, and then work on it again tomorrow or Friday. Instead, I worked on other little things for the rest of my free time, like sand-blasting the rear swing plates and torsion bar covers, installing a neato new two-stage safety coupler on my air line, cleaning up the work area, etc. You know, sort of secondary stuff that you keep putting off doing while you are working on the major project.

I'm really excited about getting the floor in, because this is going to be the first time since I've owned the car that the floor doesn't have any holes in it, but I want to do it right. Better safe than sorry.

Doors back on; Fitting Front Half of Floor Pan

Here is a picture of the finished diagonal member brace which connects the back side of the battery box to the front bulkhead/floor pan area. I finished it last week but didn't get a picture until this morning.

After doing a bit of finish grinding on the seams of the diagonal brace this morning, I set about unwrapping my doors, which have been in storage for months, ever since the media blasting last fall to be exact. They aren't in primer either; they were simply treated with Ospho or some other metal treatment and left bare, because they need some repairs on the leading edge and at the bottom. Originally Frank Gibson was doing this work, but I think I'm going to finish it up.

It is suggested by many people to make sure that the door hinge pins have good clearance and work freely before beginning re-assembly. I took this time to make sure that this was the case. Forty years of accumulated gunk and rust had made the hinge pins want to stick inside the hinges, and if you look back, I had a very difficult time removing them in the first place. I used a small round file to clean out the bores of the hinges, and I did the same to the outer surface of the hinge pins. I kept at it for all of the pins until they slid into the hinges with only a bit of effort, and didn't take extraordinary measures to remove. Then I put the doors back on the car!

Door fit remains good but they may need a bit of adjustment. Especially the front edge on the driver's side seems too narrow, and it seems to stick out more at the bottom than at the top. I don't remember it being this was upon disassembly, but who knows, the whole car looked like such a mess way back then, I probably didn't notice things like that.

The main reason for putting the doors back on the body is to make sure that I don't warp things dramatically when I weld in the floor pan. There will be a lot of heat going into the car, and the potential for tweaking things badly is there if I don't go slowly and deliberately. Having the doors in place will make sure I don't mess up the front and rear gaps during the process. I'm not concerned about the rocker gap, because I don't have any rockers right now, and I can make that gap perfect whe I put the new rockers on.

I spent the last hour or so today getting the front half of the floor pan into shape. Same routine as at the rear: Measure, trim a bit off the sides with air shears, measure again, trim a bit more, get it roughly in place, and then do more small bits of trimming with the plasma cutter. I finished about 80% of the job today, there are still a few small areas of interference at the front portion where there are some curves and angles, but I should be able to get that addressed tomorrow. If all proceeds according to plan, I'll punch holes for plug welds in both the front and rear halves of the pan tomorrow, and get them both fitted in place. If I have enough time, I may even tack it in!

Diagonal Member Replaced

I've gotten the diagonal crossmember up front replaced this week, it wasn't that hard and I don't have many "during" pictures, but I'll get a picture of the finished result uploaded soon. I haven't done much else because our regular babysitter is on vacation and I'm at home more helping take care of the kids.

Three children under the age of three is difficult. Enough said.

Front Bulkhead Area Finished; Diagonal Member Removed

Today I finished fabricating and welding in the replacement portions for the lower part of the front bulkhead. It probably doesn't look quite as good as it would have if I had used a reproduction stamped piece for the patch, but then again, it didn't cost me $130, either.

I then removed what was left of the diagonal member, which I will be replacing. It was easy to remove; just cut off flush on either side of the lower part of the torsion bar crossmember.

After I was done doing this cutting and welding, I turned my attention to doing ab it of cleanup inside the tunnel. After all, after the new floor pan is welded back in place, this is going to be a hollow, largely inaccessible cavity. Though I had cleaned out the emergency brake, clutch, and heater cable tubes before in the past, there was still some grit and junk in those because they have been exposed. I sent solvent-soaked wipes shooting through them with a blast of compressed air and cleaned them out even more thoroughly. Then I scraped grease out of the area between the bulkhead and the battery box, where the torsion bar crossmember is. Even though the car was media blasted, the media didn't remove the greasy undercoating in a number of places. This is one of the areas where it was applied very thickly. It makes a total mess when you remove it, especially now that it is summertime because it is much more like grease and much less like undercoat. I curse the person who applied this in the past, even if it did keep parts of the car from turning into iron oxide.

I finished by painting the inside of the right longitudinal with Eastwood's Rust Encapsulator for good measure. I did that on the left side, too. It can't hurt, and there is some surface rust that is on the heater tubes and upper part of the inner longitudinal, so best to control it if possible.

Thursday I should have time to weld in the replacement diagonal brace, and then get to work trimming up the right side outer longitudinal.

Front Bulkhead Area Started

Started working on the front bulkhead area today, where the front of the floor pan will rest. I spent about 4 hours on it total, and only managed to weld in a small section. Most of the time was spent carefully removing metal, because there is a 4-layer sandwich up there: support "struts" at the front of the tunnel, followed by floor pan, followed by bulkhead, followed by diagonal bracing member which extends out to the torsion bar tubes.

Carefully dissecting this so as to leave the good parts of the bulkhead and tunnel struts in place took careful work with the cut-off wheel and plasma cutter. I managed to weld in the center section of the bulkhead, and I should be able to finish the repairs tomorrow. There is a little "lip" to the bulkhead sill that I had to hand fabricate out of 20 gauge stock. After that is done, I will move back to finishing the right side outer longitudinal, and then the floor pan, and then the replacement diagonal brace. Then, believe it or not, the frame is done. What remains after that:

• Nose panel repair
• Right side lockpost
• Very lower part of left lockpost
• Right side rear fender section, where it butts up against lockpost
• Both left and right front longitudinal closing panels
• Replacing rocker panels
• Grinding out bondo on rear panel beneath license plate and seeing what I find

I.e., there is plenty of work left. That said, it feels good to be coming to the end of the frame/undercarriage work!

I start my MBA program on the 30th of August, but there is more and more things I need to get done to prepare leading up to that. Add in the time I am spending with the family, and I need to try and accomplish as much as I can in the next two months as humanly possible.

Pictures and more details tomorrow or as soon as I can get to them.

Rear Frame Repair Finished; Fitting Floor Pan

I finished the right rear section of the frame repairs, underneath the torsion bar. Yet again, I found this part of the car incredibly frustrating to work on, even with the floor pan removed. There are a lot of frame sections coming together in this one area, and there is the heater tube running inside. Because it is the lowest point of the frame, right where any water that gets inside will collect. There are drain holes, but they probably got clogged up with mud and road debris fairly quickly. No wonder this part of the 356 was frequently rusty.

So the repairs involve lots of little fiddly pieces, and don't look very good. There is no good repair panel for the portion of the frame that I needed to repair. It turns out that the Stoddard patch panel is for the outside portion of the frame, beneath the torsion bar. That wasn't a very rotten portion of my car. The worst part of my car was on the inside of the frame, right where the heater tube enters the car, and inside the longitudinal, where the heater tube comes out of the frame. These sections on my car were in horrible shape. The heater tube itself was also totally rotten at this point. I did my best, and the results are a certain improvement, but not perfect. Not all the rust was gone, which bothers me, but further work would be very difficult. I coated everything with a good coating of cold galvanizing paint, and I'm hoping that since the car isn't going to see the kind of abuse it saw earlier in its life, it will be enough. I would hate to have to re-visit this portion of the car in ten years.

After "finishing" the frame, I started to think about putting on the right side outer longitudinal, and then got excited about seeing how the floor pan will look when it is finally in place. I took some measurements and started trimming the rear portion of the pan to make a good fit, because the replacement pan was oversized about an inch and a half on either side. That part of the trimming was simple, but then I spent a good amount of time working on getting the pan to fit up in between the back of the tunnel, and the remaining "lip/sill" at the back of the car where the bulkhead of the rear seats is. It is sandwiched between these two members, and without bending up the very rear portion of the tunnel, it was too tight a fit. Lots of slight adjustments, banging with the rubber mallet, and cursing, because it was something like 95 degrees outside and I was hot as hell. Finally I got a good fit.

I realized that I was still a bit ahead of myself though. I really should finish repairing the sill of the front bulkhead at the front of the car before I contemplate putting in the floor pan, as the front half of the pan needs to rest on it. Also, I need to re-mount the doors to make sure I don't warp anything putting in the pan. I might as well put on the right side longitudinal as well, because that's how I did the left side. All that holding true, it was fun to see that the car is starting to take shape!

I didn't get much more done last week because of commitments at home, and I was also juggling work on the 356 with getting the air conditioning on my 911 working. While I know that the 911 is notorious for bad air conditioning, I need it to work because it is a hot summer here in North Carolina, and that is my daily driver car. I am replacing the receiver-drier with a ProCooler, and I had a new hose fabricated that goes between the evaporator and the rear condenser, because the one on the car had a tear. I'll be charging the system with R134A and hoping for cold air.

On a last note, I had to return the Husky 3/8" impact wrench from Home Depot. When it arrived, it was 1/2", not 3/8", and the ft/lb. rating was way below what the website description was. A long conversation with Home Depot lead to discovery that the website was wrong. Figures. I bought a slightly used Ingersoll-Rand IR215 model on eBay instead, for the same price. It should be great.

Rear Seats Done, Right Side Frame Area

Just a quick note tonight, as the twins are keeping us busy and I don't have a lot of time:

The rear seats are done. I feel quite good about the result. The butt-weld seam isn't totally invisible, but almost. A bit of caulk on the outside (exterior) seam and it will be nearly perfect. I did get the curvature correct, and after the car is upholstered, you will never know that these were replaced. The replacement metal is a lot more solid than what I removed from the car, a definite improvement.

I was busy with the twins for much of this week, but yesterday I devoted several hours to repairing the wiring harness. In addition to a few additional places in both the back and front portions of the harness that had melted on the outer sheathing because of welding on adjacent panels, the shrink-wrap tubing that covers the majority of the harness seems to have become brittle with time. In a number of places, where the harness had kinks and bends, the tubing had cracked. I removed the bad portions of the shrink-wrap tubing and recovered things with a thick layer of electrical tape. New shrink-wrap tubing would have been better, but I didn't have any with the correct, large diameter available. In the two or three places where the harness had been damaged a bit more, I made sure the wires were intact before taping up the individual wires and then taping the bundle. The complete product is not as good as new, but it is good and I will test everything for shorts upon installation.

Replacement harnesses cost over one thousand dollars, and I imagine installing them is quite difficult because of the awkward angles and narrow spaces it has to fit through.

Today I worked on the right rear frame section beneath the rear torsion bar. It was a bit more rotten than the left side. Originally I intended to use a reproduction stamping to patch this area, from Stoddard, but I found out that the stamping covered a portion of the frame that for me, was in good shape! The rotten parts don't have replacement metal readily available. Therefore, like on the left side, I was forced to fabricate pretty much all the patches. Because I lack a good metal brake, I had to do a lot of pounding on little patches in the vise, and build things up in sections. The heater tube section where the tube enters the body at the rear had quite a few holes.

The right solution would have been to cut the majority of the rear heater tube section completely out of the frame, and then to patch or replace it off the car. Easier said than done. I thought about doing that for about an hour, and even started to cut it out. The angles are just too difficult. I was about to get in over my head with the amount of frame that would require cutting just to remove the tube, and I reversed courses of action, deciding that patches were a better idea. In the end, I think I sealed up 95% of the leaks in the pipe, and then I slathered everything in zinc-rich primer. Then, I started rebuilding the frame section, and I completed about 80% of that today. It doesn't look very pretty, but it is a good approximation of what was there before, and I hope that it contributes to the strength of the car in this area. I used thicker sheet metal for the patches than I have used elsewhere in the car.

New tool from eBay: Ingersoll-Rand IR302 die grinder. This is their top-of-the-line model that should just about power through everything without stalling. New, they are well over $100. I got mine for about $30 lightly used. Not bad! I also ordered a Home Depot Husky Pro 3/8 impact wrench, model H4103. This tool is made by Florida Pneumatic, who makes a number of professional OEM lines of tools, and it delivers XXX ft lbs. of torque. A nice tool, I hope. I plan on using it with a impact-driven stud remover I got to get out the broken exhaust stud in the head of the 356 C engine I have.

Engine Compartment Complete, Rear Seat Patches

Wow. In the time that the car has been at the rental space, I have been treating my work on it more like a "real job," and my productivity has increased proportionally. It is harder to just go inside to take a break, so things are proceeding more consistently as well. The result: I have finished the engine compartment, and almost finished patching one of the rear seats as well.

In my last entry, I noted that I had welded in the engine/muffler heat shield (just took a couple of plug welds), and I was fitting up the engine shelf that surrounds the engine. The wasn't too hard to finish; I had to do a bit of trimming at the front corners, to make a smooth radius. You can see the accompanying pictures for the details. Welding the engine shelf in was a simple matter of aligning it properly along the sides and at the rear, clamping, and plug welding. I made a tight overlap of the two pieces at the rear and plug welded them together. The final step was plug welding the front edge of the heat shield to the front edge of the shelf. Then the usual grinding and primer. It wasn't too bad, and took about 5-6 hours of work total. I finished that this past Monday.

To follow this up, I decided to try working on the rear seats next, if for nothing else than my desire to get the big patch section of the donor car I bought disposed of. Both people in the shop who had touched this area in the past told me it would be a difficult repair, because of the curvature of the pieces. I decided to do it in two sections rather than attempting a single section with both seat areas and the tunnel hump as a single unit.

Using the plasma cutter, I removed a large section of the driver's side (left) rear seat area. I then took it to the blast cabinet to get it really clean. Although the replacement metal is much better than the portions of my car I am removing, unfortunately, it is not perfect, and there is a bit of pitting in places.

After getting the replacement metal in shape, I placed the patch on top of my rear seat area and scribed the outline. Then I cut out the passenger side rear seat from the car, making sure I was well inside the line I had previously scribed. I know from experience that it is much better to have too much material overlapping after this maneuver than too little!

A lot of cutting and fitting and grinding and fitting, I finally got a pretty good fit between the car and the patch piece. Not as perfect as I wanted, but close enough to do a decent butt weld. I proceeded with the usual process, tack welding every few inches, followed up with short butt welds. The metal on the outside of the patch piece was quite thin, and this lead to burn-through if I wasn't careful and put too much heat into the weld without pausing. Welding on thin metal is another technique that you have to learn by trial-and-error. If you don't have a stitch/spot timer on your welder (and none of the smaller, more inexpensive welders have this feature) you have to simulate it as such by pulsing your gun on and off, overlapping your weld bead. You stop right when you see that the weld puddle is about to burn away from the metal you are welding to. Sometimes, you are too late, and then you have a small hole. "Chasing holes," so they say. You have to pause until the puddle cools, and then use that section as your jumping off point for next arc, putting a small bit of metal down to cover the hole you just blew through the panel. Then you have to pause again, let everything cool down a bit, or you'll just enlarge the hole, or make it creep along.

I finished welding in the rear left seat on Tuesday, and tomorrow I hope to grind the weld bead down and make it look pretty, filling in any pin-holes. I'll probably do the right rear seat right after that, and then move back to the right longitudinal area. Still no response from my e-mail to Stoddard, so perhaps I'm going to get impatient and make the patches to the frame area myself.