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Picking up from the second post, we've got the body off the frame, body braces in place, and the front half of the floor pan removed in preparation for the installation of the new AMD floor pan.

In this post, I'll describe the removal of the rear section of the pan. Now, I'm working with a convertible, which is something I should have disclosed in the first post - that explains the bracing, for one. But there are also some unique body components that are particular to the convertible, and those come into play here.

Once you get behind the door opening, the side of the convertible body is braced to the floor with a large boxed gusset, which is a triangle box that welds to the side of the body at the rear glass cavity and to the floor right at the front limit of the rear seat. We wanted to leave these braces in place, so the steps below are based on that strategy.

1. The rocker panels have welds along the top seam above the edge of the floor pan. You'll notice that they stop just ahead of the boxed gusset. We found that there were no welds beneath the box, which is a good thing! Drill out all of the welds that you can see in front of and past the gusset.

2. The gusset is seam welded to the floor. To remove these, we used various combinations of a 3" air cut-off wheel and a 4" electric grinder. We gouged out the weld as much as possible. There are three or four welds, depending on how you count them: one along the forward edge, one along the rear edge, and one or two along the side edge. Grind as much as possible, trying to undermine the weld by getting underneath the gusset, but not reducing the gusset.

3. The rear corners of the floor are welded to the rear fender well with spot welds along about a 12" curved length. These were easier to remove from the wheel well side. You'll have to scrape away the undercoating and grind the surface a little to reveal the little weld dimples. Here we found that the welds were closer than 3". In fact, they looked very haphazard. Some were less than an inch apart, causing some damage that needed to be patched.

4. The length across the back end of the car is where I made a judgement call and decided to NOT remove the spot welds. There are three body sections that all sandwich together at this point. The floor is the bottom layer, the trunk is the middle layer, and the rear seat bulkhead is the top layer. I don't believe they welded these together all at once, so there are surely welds that are hidden. I decided to use an air shear and cut across the full length just ahead of this layered section. Then, I used the grinder to remove the remainder of the floor lip. So, a bit of the floor remains here and this will be an extra layer in the sandwich. I plan to weld the floor with stitch welds along the top and will probably punch holes in the floor pan to spot weld from the bottom.

In the last post on removing the floor, I'll cover a few trouble spots and offer a few additional tips!

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