Fitting Cargo Floor

I started the floor replacement by making a new lower strike plate using the dimensions from the one I cut from the original floor, I know you can buy these but for the sake of £12 and a couple of hours I could make my own. It actually took two attempts and about 6 hours. As I don't charge myself hourly labour this is a bargain.

There were a few places around the floor that needed trimming, including one of the holes for the heater tube. This was about an inch out so I cut and welded a patch to move the hole to the correct position.

The sill repair had the joggled part of the panel poking up inside, so I trimmed this off and ground the welds flush.

I then painted all the cargo bay chaise the classic rust proof Ork Blood Red to keep away any evil spirits.

Picking a hot clear day as I'm a fair weather welder, I got the van out of the garage to get it jacked up as high as it could safely go, then a bit higher.  I decided to weld the floor from the underside, this meant I didn't need to grind down each weld between the corrugations, just work upside down. I marked each position I needed to weld and rubbed the paint off.

I set the two pieces of floor up on anything I could find. This being a cheap B&Q pasting table that's not very flat when it had the weight of the floor on it. I spot welded down the center as far in as I could, then tacked the rest of the centre together, This was hard to get both parts flat then welded without leaning on them and their very wobbly stand.

I clamped up my hand made strike plate and spot welded it on. Did I mention how much fun it is welding pieces of steel together with big copper probes that glow and spark all over the place. (I'd now put a smiley here if I had one handy)

With the floor in one piece I donned my leather apron and gauntlets and crawled under the van to start tacking each piece of bare metal together. With help from my (nameless!) girlfriend inside the van pushing the floor down I starting welding from the centre working outwards. We then got to enjoy for the first time in a long time a solid floor in the van (no not in that way)

The next evening I finished the last few places that were either too hard to get to or were not able to push down with just the weight of a single person. So I put on my bodgers' thinking cap and came up with the ingenius plan to push the floor down with my 1.5t jack and some left over decking poles,

This worked OK for the back welds but when I took the contraption apart to move it forwards to use it on the forward places that I needed to weld, I discovered I had pushed my window and door frame up (who would have guessed using a trolley jack inside a van...) This was a very silly mistake to make. The door frame I managed to persuade straight again but I'll need to make a dolly up to fit between the window frame skins.

I then tacked welded the edges around the floor and finished carefully with seam welding the back joint below the engine bay bulkhead.

Clean up and paint, Job done.

944 porsche brembo break caliper restoration

These brembo callipers are from a 944 turbo. I got from e-bay, when they arrived after a clean up I noticed the break pad slider plates were lifting due to the corrosion under them, This I believe is quite a common problem for these, Its a bit of a bad design having aluminum, steel and stainless steel all attached together its just asking for dissimilar metal corrosion. the photos are from my phone so not the best.

So to get these off I first tried the torque bit but that of course just rounded the rusted heads off, So this job just got a lot harder. I got hold of a 90 degree air drill, these drills have specific sized collet's that allow 0.5mm-5mm drill bits to fit to it. I had to shorten my drills so they would fit inside the calliper.

I started by drilling in the center of the head down to the plate just below the head of the bolt, this allowed me to chisel the head off each bolt. Once all the heads were off the slider plates just pinged off with a lever from a screwdriver.

I was left with a clear view off all the aluminium corrosion and a seized bolt with out a head. I then used the existing drill hole in the head to start drilling into the shaft with a smaller drill.

To make sure I only drilled into the shaft of the bolt and not into the calliper body I drew a 90 degree line on a scrap piece of plate to use as a visual guide as i drilled. There's a gap at the bottom of the bolt shaft so you can tell when the drill has cut through the bottom of the bolt.

Once each bolt was drilled I used a snap-on screw extractor, this type allowed me to use a spanner on the shaft because a normal screw extractor and tap wrench would not fit inside the calliper. These screws came out very easily once the pressure from the pad slider plate was released.