Well it looks like the 442 I just bought needs a full set of floor pans. Has anyone done floor plans, and if so what do the recommend - full pan, two halves (left and right), or 4 sections?


Thanks
JD

 

The one piece pan is by far the best product to use for both ease of installation and quality of the finished product. Unfortunately you need to have the body off the frame to install it. If that's not an option, the 2pc vs 4pc is really a question of how much of the floor needs to be replaced.

 

It really depends on how badly rusted are your floors. Patch panels are less invasive but can be tricky to get everything to line up properly. I just installed a full pan on my 72 442 convertible. I decided to do a full pan for 3 reasons: 1.) The floor in my car looked like swiss cheese so any surrounding metal that wasn't completely rusted thru was pretty thin. 2.) Several of the cross braces that run across the underside of the pan were rusted out. 3.) The full pan leaves little evidence of the repair because you separate the metal at the factory spot welds and seams, unlike the patch panels or the half pans where you can see the welds.
It is a lot of work to do a full pan; it's is tedious but it's not rocket science. A good wire feed welder with shielding gas makes this go alot more smoothly. I tried using a Chinesium flux-core welder from Harbor Freight that made terrible welds, so I used a MIG135 from Eastwood that works really well. I bought my pan from AMD #400-3468, that included the inner rocker panels, the floor braces and the seat belt mounts. It also was more correct for a convertible because it had a triangular brace at the rear quarters that no other vendors had. That said, I still had to modify a few areas to make it work, the most significant was relocating the outer seat belt mounts which were too far forward for my retractable mechanisms.
Basically, you drill out all the spot welds with a special bit that is flat so you only drill thru the top layer of sheet metal. Then you separate the panels with an old chisel, a wide putty knife and some small pry bars. I'm glad that I replaced the inner rockers because there was significant surface rust on the inside that was completely hidden. I was able to remove the rust or treat these areas with a rust convertor. The most difficult area to separate is at the front body seam where the cowl meets the rest of the body. But after studying carefully I figured out how to take this apart. Here are some pics:

 

Here's a few more pics.

 

wow thats some nice work Rod !!

but to be fair I dont think swiss cheese has that many holes

 

I agree - you do nice work.. My floors are in similar condition to your before shots. I am thinking of going with the two piece as I wasn't planning to pull the body from the frame. The car is going to be a 2 to 3 year restoration so I might change my mind as I get into it more.

 

RetroRanger,
I think you're right about holes. I filled up a 5 gallon shop vac full of rust from under the carpeting. This car was in worse shape than I originally thot.

 

John:
I bought my AMD floor pan from Tamraz, his price included the shipping which is truck freight because it's too large to send by UPS or FedEx. Here's a link to his ebay listing.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/68-72-A-Body...68734d&vxp=mtr

I'm very pleased with the quality of this part. It was well packaged so it didn't get damaged during shipping, and it fits really well with minimal tweaking. AMD has their own dies for their parts so the stampings are better than some other vendors. Some sheet metal parts for our cars are stamped on 40-year old dies sold at auction when GM discontinued these items. You can only stamp so many parts before the dies begin to wear out and the stampings are no longer accurate. I'm happy to answer any question you may have.

 

The guy doing my metal work came by to see the car for the first time last night, although it needs a trunk pan, floor pan, and sail panel, he thinks the car is in overall good condition, and estimates about 125 hours of work to put them all in. He is having the car towed to his show at the end of January, I just need to start tearing down the underside.

 

+1 on AMD. Bought a right front at Summit to cut some patches from it, packaging was not sooo good but I'd rather believe that the floor pan damages the plane during shipping than the pan gets damaged itself.

 

I've used classic2custom fabrication before. They are cheap. One pan fit like a glove. The other had to be formed with a hammer. My holes were not as bad as the above so I was able to get a front side and rear side piece.