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Floorpan welding - part 2

Once I got all the rust cut out I started patching in pieces of steel, coating everything with self-etching primer, sealing the seams with silicone, and coating everything in rubberized undercoating. I hadn't exactly planned how I was going to patch things together and I just flew by the seat of my pants. The first pieces I cut and bent were quite awkward, and poorly done. By the time I finished I was bending some pretty respectable patches, if I do say so myself.

I'm missing about 10 days worth of photos since I thought I had lost my camera. I had snapped a few with my camera phone but the quality is lousy. Ignore my lousy looking welds, remember I'm trying to weld 22 gauge steel with a 70/90A flux-core MIG. They're plenty strong, though.

The worst of the rust was on the driver's side, but I had some similar holes on the passenger's side as well, and some holes that were only accessible from below. I didn't get photos of everything, I was too pressed for time and too sick of welding to bother by the time I got there. This driver's side took me what seemed like forever, and you can't even see all of the work required on that side in this photo.

Floorpan welding - part 1

This is the step that took most of my garage time if you were to track hours, even more than building up the engine. I discovered that my "small holes" in the floor was actually major rot. The driver's side floor was essentially only attached to the center of the car and not on the outside, and a large chunk of the floor was soft. I'm not 100% sure about this but I think the seam sealer used in the factory contained some kind of rust promoter. At least that's what it looks like.

Had I discovered all the rusty metal I needed to replace at once, I probably would have begun searching for another LeBaron and turned this one into a parts car. Fortunately for this particular LeBaron I did not. It wasn't until I had gone far into the welding that I discovered how much work I was looking at.

I set about cutting out the rusty steel. Once I started poking the little hole by the parking brake cable it turned into a large hole, then into a really big hole, then a Fred Flintstone-style hole.

The next step was to whip my welding skills back into shape. I last welded about 12 years ago, using a DC arc welder, on 1/8 to 1/4 inch mild steel. I picked up a portable MIG from Princess Auto for $129, and tried to re-learn how to weld on 22-gauge steel. A few evenings of blasting holes no matter how careful thought I was yielded a technique that worked for me. Very, very short blasts. For $129 you don't get the best welder out there, and all I had was a 70/90 amp switch. People will tell you 70A is far too much for 22 gauge steel, and they're probably right. I made it work.

I also invented a new art form. I call it "sheetmetaligami" where I fold complex shapes out of sheetmetal then weld them together to form a larger object.

It's alive!

Maybe now that I can get out of the garage I can back-fill some missing posts about my progress.

The mighty LeBaron is moving under its own power. And power it has! Much, much better than before. There were a couple of times while I was doing the 20-mile breakin where I kinda scared myself.

It's still fun.