Floor Pan replacement

Be Cool.....AIRCOOLED !!

"Wild" Bill Tucker

President Rare Air VW Club Pensacola, Florida

'78 VW Bus ( "Old Rusty" )

'76 Bug "The Grape"

'69 Squareback , Arizona car, Automatic

Rare Air VW Club Website:

Totally agree - Here are some stills/description from that video:

Sounds good - have fun with it! You may still want to get the video, though. It is good quality, with solid information that the stills do not provide.

A couple of months ago I built a method of lifting the body, letting me hover the frame over the body. I wanted to be able to lift/drop the body by myself, without having to call any friends over.

Upto yesterday, I'd lift the body, do some work on the frame and lower the body again when done for the day. Yesteday I actually pulled the body from under the frame as I am getting ready to work on the frame in the garage. Once lifted, it was easier to pull the tires off, put the frame on dollies and pull the frame out sideways. I had the two separated in about 20 minutes. It would have been 10 minutes, if I had remembered to take the stick shifter off: After I thought it was all clear, it took me a good 10 minutes to figure out that the stick was holding up progress :)

It is ugly, but it works great for me:

Remco

Btw, I didn't mean to imply that you will need to lift the body off: I had to because, besides having bad floors, my heather channels are bad as well.

You could consider using the Floorpan and Trunk Restoration Kit from POR-15. I have been using their products for a while now, and they work good. My friends use the kit to repair his trunk and it looks great now. You can find it here:

I hope he got that follow up !

I can imagine him now sawing chiseling hammering ... body comes of at 3 in the morining, then he comes in an reads the followup !

Rich :-)

Yeah, huh :D Well, on the up side, it does build character... :)

Yeah - You cant say you are 'into vw's ' if you havent taken a body off ;-)

Rich

Oh No ! I love my little bugs body LOL. I hope not to have to remove it to get the job done. Just got the body in good shape. Now if only I can get my body in good shape. :-)

Tricky wrote:

How much would be fair to pay someone to weld New Floor Pans on? BTW the Body will already be off. There is a local welding and machine shop I might take it to or a co-worker/friend who recently graduated welding school.

Thanks Steven

I've never had any welding done by someone else, but can't imagine it costing a fortune, because it is welded on with just spot welds -- they say running a bead may cause cracking eventually. Carefully measure the current pan's hole positions, cut it out, prep the area and put the new pan in using screws (those used for fastening metal studs together seem to work well). This way everything is all rigged and all the guy has to do is throw some welds down.

If the guy has to come to your house, he may charge 2-3 hours or so.

Not sure if this will be useful to you or not: The way I aligned my new pan to my old one is by laying four scrap pieces of plywood against the tunnel, pushed into the corners where it meets the left/right front firewall and rear crossbraces. It is put in a corner so that there's no question what that this fixture uses as an index - those corners do not move, even after you remove the floor, so that can be counted on to align your new floor.

Drill holes up from the current pan's mounting holes into the plywood and repeat this for all four corners of the floor (if you end up using separate pieces of plywood, be sure to mark them well so you know where they belong). Then cut the old pan out, prep and put the new one on. By aligning the plywood with the appropriate corner and the hole you drilled with the hole in your new floor, you'll be able to position the floor exactly where it belongs (without actually measuring with tape). You then tack or screw the floor in place and get ready to weld.

Perhaps the above is a little over-analyzed (a mental illness on my part :), but it is dead accurate and pretty simple to do.

Remco

What I was going to do was take the chasis to him and my Bug me Video DVD and let him do the whole thing. Taking it out and putting in the new one. I don't have a asSaw-Saw and am not that good at cutting so I'd prefer somene who knew a little more about this than I do. But have to finish the front brakes before I can move the car.

That works too :)