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.

Cargo Bay Floor Removal Pt2

For the second attempt at attacking the floor I managed finish cutting all the way around and pull it up in one piece, although I did have to cut around the jacking points, and the spot welds under the seat rail plates had me stumped until I had a bit of help from a large chisel. The only things that gave me any trouble was the welding on the previously replaced sills. Although the door side was cut away earlier and also where the heater tubes come through the back of the floor, it was hard to get a cutting disc around most of it, so I chain drilled the tight corners here and the other places around the floor that a cutting disc would not fit.

One mistake I did make was along the front edge was cutting too deep through the floor and into the front support beam that was in reasonable condition. This means I will have to remove this support without damaging the lower edge of the forward bulkhead lower skin that this support is spot welded to. I am not sure how much trouble this will be.

As for the forward and back cut edges where the floor is folded up and spot welded I went round and peeled these remaining strips away by pealing and twisting the metal strips causing the welds to pop away leaving a small raised weld to grind off. This is a lot easier that grinding off the whole strip or drilling each weld but it could distort the good panel which is easy enough to tap straight again, but in the worst case it could rip away the weld so be careful when you do this. The edge of the floor that attaches between the rear wheel arches and the lower part of the forward engine bay fire wall is S shaped and not a simple 90 degree L shape as I thought, so I'll be leaving this part in tacked until I see what the new floor looks like.

Cargo Bay Floor Removal Pt1

After a lot of contemplation I finally committed to pulling up the whole cargo floor area. This was not a decision taken likely, many hours staring at the rust and the calculating how may repair patches would be needed in that corrugated floor, and how impressed I was with the replacement floors produced from Muscle Bus, finally got me to the decision to attack the many spot welds that pin this floor down. Once I started I knew I had made the right decision. I just hope I don't regret it later. I could have attacked the floor slicing it to pieces with a cutting disc along the edges of the outriggers which would have been fun but I felt I wanted some sort of recovery plan if I did make a huge balls up. So I decided to take the floor up in one piece, this meant removing every single spot weld. Although I had a spot weld drill I found it better to start with a sharp 1/8" drill bit carefully cutting only through the first piece of floor then finishing with a 3/16" that I'd slightly ground the tip flat so that it cut no further than the depth of the first drill bit. I only slipped through both pieces on a few holes and my knees suffered for too long on the ridges of the cargo floor.