Passenger Floor Demo and Prep

With the rear bulkhead and spring hangers under control, it’s time to get the floors out and prepare for the new pan install. A sawzall and grinder with cutting wheel made shot work of the rusty old floor pans. What isn’t represented here is the hours of grinding the spot welds and cleaning up the flanges which is required before being able to install the new floors.

The next order of business was to cut away the outer sill (rocker panel) to see if any of the inner sill was salvageable. Not surprised, but what I found inside was a corroded mess. There was no point in grafting new metal to any of the old sill, so it was cut out. I chose to also cut the chassis leg which runs from the tunnel to the inner sill.

The remaining prep work included fitting up the new chassis leg and shoring up the footwell end panel. Prior to cutting the old chassis leg, I had taken measurements from the tunnel. With this, I could tell how much of the new chassis leg to cut to maintain the dimensions. I prepped the old stump by welding in some sheet metal flanges. This gave me a lot of surface area for welding and support for when the piece were butt welded together. The chief concern here is obviously the length of the chassis leg, but also alignment to the remaining stump as well as how fore and aft the end of the chassis leg ends up. The chassis leg protrusion will stick through a hole on the new inner sill (rocker panel).

The final piece to address for the floor is to have a complete footwell end panel. This panel is the backside of the front wheel well so it gets all of the road debris and spray. On this car, there was a fiberglass panel covering a rather large hole that rust had eaten away. I cut away the rusty section and ground out the spot welds which secured it to the front suspension triangle. Finally, a new piece of sheet metal was fitted and welded into place. it was butt welded along the top and sides to the car’s existing metal. It was fastened to the suspension triangle with a series of plug welds. This would be the last bit of work on the MG for the summer.