rockersandfloors9

Wow, its been well over a year since my last update. Real life has interupted the
progress I was making on the Impala. The last day I worked on the car was
03/27/07. I started up again during the first week of April 2008. Last year was
pretty hectic. I got married in September, and spent a good part of my summer
getting ready for that with house projects etc etc etc. THEN about five weeks
before the wedding, our house recieved a direct lightning strike, which started a
fire between the ceiling of the basement and the first floor. The lighting actually
traveled along a flexline that carries LP to our fireplace and literally blew about 12
inches of the line out. How the house didn't explode from that is beyond me, since
the line was charged with LP. Someone was looking out for us that night.

So, it you are still following my project... Hopefully the updates will be a little more
frequent from now on ;-). After finishing up the hammerforms for the B-pillar and
the structure behind the quarterpanel, I started focusing on the actual installation of
the floors. The rear seat pans were first.

The first thing I had to do was to cut the rusted ends of the front full
floor brace and weld on the ends from Cars INC. These ends are designed
to be lapped with the original piece. They fit like crap. Pardon my french.
So after welding them up, I didn't like the way things looked so I fabbed
up a little angle piece that I could overlap the seam with. This was made
with 1/8 steel and plug welded into place. Maybe overkill, but nows not the
time to skimp.

I'm going to skip a lot of the gory details with the floor braces. Needless
to say, they didnt'fit well to the rockers and the pans. If I fit the brace
nice to the rocker (the flanges tight to the rocker) the alignement to the
pan was lousy. If I set the brace nice to the pan then I had a gap
between the rocker and the flange, and would have a difficult time plug
welding it and having a solid connection. So I spend a good deal of time
modifying the flanges on each of the floor braces so that they fit nice to
the pan, and tight to the rocker. Overkill? Probably, I've been told I'm
nuts on several occasions.

I pulled the rear seat and back down from my loft and installed them just
to make sure everything was square to the world. there were some
difference in the old versus new pans, and I didn't have any good
reference points between the two to accurately transfer the bracets.
Now's the time to catch any mistakes.

The floor braces FINALLY welded into place. At some point you have to shoot the
engineer and start production. Ironically, I'm am an engineer. :-). The second pic
is a shot of the rear seat pans primed in SPI epoxy. I'm using 1" diamter
stickers to cover all the holes that I've drilled into the pan where I will be plug
welding. I spray the whole, pan, and after the epoxy sets up, pull the stickers
off. I'm left with bare metal, on which I spray 3M weld thru coating on.

I had to transfer another support that I
salvaged off the original floor pans. The
original piece fit almost perfectly to the new
pan. Some quick plug welds, a little touch up
with a brush and epoxy over the freshly
ground welds and its done. I also had to weld
the seat belt bracket on.

Unfortunately, the "fun" doesn't stop here. I now have to fab up the "B"
pillar braces that I removed during the cutting out of the original pans.
One of the braces was pretty beat up from being cut from the car, so
I've opted to make a new one. What can I say, I'm a glutton for
punishment

I needed to weld on some flange to the other brace since I ended up
cutting those off.

The next step will be to do the same thing on the drivers side, weld them
in and THEN the saga of the floors will be complete.