Floors and Doors

I hope Neil Young will remember, a southern man don’t need him around anyhow. Kind of like rust.

Speaking of Neil Young and rust…

Rust never sleeps — Neil Young and Crazy Horse

Seemed apropos if we’re going to talk about body work on an old truck.

Floor pans. The bane of all old trucks. First to rust, easy to hack, a pain to actually fix. The PO of the truck I’m working on took the “hack” approach and cut out some aluminum, smeared some silicon sealant on it, and sheet-metal-screwed it to the rusted out stuff around where the floors were supposed to be.

I ordered some floorpans from bjsoffroad.com The jury is still out on BJs. They are specializing in SJs but they don’t have all the things I’d like for them to have. My opinion may improve over time. It’s been tough to source a bunch of the stuff for the Gladiator. I’ve ordered basically everything they offer for the truck. They do have a bunch of the soft parts (weather stripping, etc.). At least they had that. Apparently there is no source for the window gasket around the small back window. Not sure what I’m going to do there yet… but that’s for another day.

As is normal the floor pans are shipped only roughly resembling what you need. Here is the driver side kind of placed on top of the primed floor.

You can see where I’ve already started to pull back the mostly-rusted-away remnants of the original floors. I have a seam splitter, a spot weld drill bit, a pair of pliars, electric hand grinder and a drill with assorted drill bits. Oh yeah, and a few screwdrivers. Below you can also see a map gas canister here. I was using that to try to get some of the few bits of seam sealer / silicon / whatever to degrade enough to where it was easier to scrape off before I started welding. I did have to make a patch that needed to go under the replacement floor patch from BJs. At this point that patch was tacked in. If you put your crappy welds out on the web you can talk bad about mine. Until then keep your judgey self out of my welding failures. I’m willing to grind and paint to make the welder I ain’t.

Here’s a first fitting. You’ll notice another strip of steel up near where your toes go on the floorboard. It turns out that the truck had rusted a bit up the firewall too. I’ll need to get that patch in first as well. Sheesh.

After cursing, grinding, priming, cursing, welding, beating with a rubber mallet, a lot, cursing, welding, hammering with a body hammer and generally teasing the firewall patch in and then doing the same with the floor patch I got this far:

Not perfect but not shabby. During the effort I found this spot was in worse shape than it appeared. It was super thin:

what happens is you start welding and then all the sudden the underlying material disappears. Sucks. In this case I was able to build up enough weld to hold it together.

However…this spot on the firewall may need another patch. You can see what happened when I welded there. Poof! Presto-chango no more steel.

Also, while under there (and it’s starting to look better), the bad things are easier to see. The side-wall where the ebrake goes has an issue:

Looks like it’ll need a patch as well. Oof. Looking on the upside: it’ll be good practice in a less-viewed area before I’m working on the external body panels. The words on the panel are not a commentary about how my mood is. That is where the dimmer goes. If you’re younger than 50 you may not remember stomping the floorboard looking for the dimmer. I remember. Maybe I am dimmer also.

After some clean-up grinding and a quick shot of self-etch primer:

Driver side looks pretty good. It’s super solid, and spot/plug welded in. it could use some seam sealer and I should tidy up underneath.

Good things are starting to show up! I ordered some garage gloves. These are the kind I like and the size that fits. I was sick and tired of bad gloves and locally all I could find was either bad gloves or wrong sizes. I ordered a case of 10 boxes. That should last a while. On an unrelated note, if you live nearby I may be able to offer you some really nice gloves at a decent price.

For the passenger floor…yeah it’s a bit of a mess. It’s going to take at least as much work and I’ll have to move the welder around. While I’m set up I took on the worst door. Here is a picture from disassembly:

This also isn’t the worst:

This is the worst…

After media blasting it’s not looking great:

Well, I think before I touch the worst corner I should tack in a patch for the long area to stabilize it so it’ll still fit later.

I took the profile of the area and cut out and bent a section of sheet metal to fit the profile with some extra width to make sure I didn’t short myself. since this is bigger than my press brake I bent it over the edge of my welding table. (…and with a hammer, and with the press and with some clamps) I think it turned out nice.

You can see I measured 3 times and cut once to take out the material.

Before cutting, I welded on a small piece of angle iron to stabilize the door sheet metal. then I cut out the lion’s share of the cancer.

First fitting… while I was nibbling away at a few spots I set the cutoff down oddly… broke a disk. NEVER run a broken disk. Cutoffs run at stupid fast RPMs and those disks make nasty projectiles. Here it’s getting closer. Don’t get too aggressive about taking metal off. It’s much harder to put back.

I also needed to cut some water drains where they were in the previous totally rusted through panel.

Here are my tools of choice for the fitting/easing/teasing/carefulling of getting that sheet to “just fit”

Note my cutoff has a guard. The die grinder does not and it has a tungsten carbide nom nom bit in it… It’s my least safe tool but sometimes you need the pointy bit to get into the cornery spot.

I also use some interesting clamps I bought when working on the Bronco project. the little bar stock on the left side moves through the flat bit with the screw attached.

How does it work? You slide the flat bit through the gap and slide the bar stock bit in place then tighten. It lines up the sheet metal to the body panel so that butt-welding is possible and will likely line up well like this:

I think my contour looks good. the sheet might be a bit gappy. Well, I can either do it or pay someone else. This is how good/bad I am.

Getting close to tacking it.

I got after it with a wire wheel to get the metal clean and ensure good weld. As I tacked from one end to the other I removed the clamps. I think it turned out ok.

Until you’re publishing your crap on the web you can’t give me crap about my tall welds. But, I think it looks like it’s lining up nicely!

This is the worst spot. will have to ease that at some point:

Now to take on the nasty bit. Yuck!

After a little cleanup I can see just how bad it is. I have some leftover contoured sheet. I can use the wide flat bit to fix the top flat bit and then maybe use the “angle iron” part for the knee. it will take a bit of coercing but it should work.

Once I got that flat bit off the angle, I did some hand bending over a thigh. Seemed good for a first poke.

Cut closer to size and shape:

I’m thinking the angle will work, I’ll just cut off the marked up area and bend it around the corner. I’ll have to really craft the knee portion. I spent some time with body hammers doing the ole tappy tap tap routine.

Once convinced it was going to work I cut away the old and busted rusted junk. It was welded to the inner structure in two places. I’ll need to replicate that.

I’ll replicate that using the cuts and fill the cuts with weld.

more trimming and tappy tap tap.

Lots little trims, coercing and small cuts and this turned out pretty well.

Here’s the worst fit. It is (as always?) the last thing to tack in. I know there are still some bad spots that I’ll need to patch. This is getting it stable and keeping enough structure so things don’t warp/twist while I work on it. It still will, but hopefully not as much.

Below is the floor shrapnel so far on this door alone.

It’s time to call it a night tonight. Will pick it up tomorrow. Not a bad place to land for the end of the day. I think I will wait to finish stitch weld until I can test fit the door to make sure I didn’t miss any big marks which will cause door open/close problems. I still have 3 areas to ease between the 2 patches and then the curve around the corner. There is also a triangle in the corner with some contour that will have to be tricked in and a few spots that need small weld-in-patches to complete the fixes.

Tomorrow is another day.

Given that the door started with this:

… and the door worked. I’m feeling pretty good about my patch.After hanging it looks like it’s close enough to adjust out any misalignment:

I may have a little body filler near the top to work in…

To finish it up, I stitch weld to distribute heat, then fill any extraneous holes. I think it turned out pretty well.

The driver door still has a few spots to work out but very few. I think those turned out well on the passenger door.

The passenger floor was also in bad shape (all the cutout space) and has some extra issues. The marked off area needs to bump out to allow some clearance for transmission cooler lines.

Here’s where it started

Here is the floor before I plug-welded it to the underlying structure:

I cut a few extra panels out and welded them in.

So, I have one more strip to tack in between the firewall and the floor.

For body work, I think I’ll get the rockers next!

Keep on rocking?

Motor mounts madman

Motor city mounts madman — the nuge —

Here’s a queue starting with Stranglehold — Ted Nugent

… and I’m figuring out the motor mounts for putting an LQ4 6.0L Chevy SBC into a 1963 Gladiator. When I pulled the motor I unbolted the 3 (obvious) bolts on the motor mount. 2 sheared off (doh!). There was another part which bolts to that block and has the rubber vibration isolation between the motor and the frame. It turned out those parts were in bad shape after 200k+ miles.

Here is the portion that I unbolted (and was left on the truck). I’ve since pulled them off the truck.

Here is the portion of the motor mount that bolts to the engine and rests on the 3 bolts (and has the rubber vibration isolation). These unbolted from the frame with 2 long bolts (you can see the holes at the bottom of the piece above). The long bolts go through supporting sleeves which have a little frame that is welded to the frame of the donor.

I plan to weld a similar structure to the inside of the frame of the Gladiator and use these stock pieces.

However… I had a little issue. 2 of the bolts were sheared off in this middle piece. Here was my solution. I welded some grape ape bolts on to stubs and was able to remove them.

With that out of the way, I purchased some new rubber bits as I mentioned before mine were worn out. Also you can see I spent some time cleaning up the components. What a mess.

So, with them cleaned up, basically the long bolts with a gap is where the sleeves go that will be welded structurally to the frame.

I’ve purchased some 1/4″ plate 6″ wide and some DOM tubing of appropriate size so I should be able to reproduce the welded on parts on the donor truck frame. It won’t look as pretty as the contoured stuff on the donor but it will be plenty strong. I’ll craft the back part of contour to the Gladiator frame.

I’ve nearly centered the engine. Here’s the spacing on each side. It’s maybe an inch too far to one side but that’s fine for the moment.

The basic idea is to get the engine floating where you want it, get the motor mount parts bolted onto the engine, and then cardboard-template the parts that need to go against the frame. Keep in mind that you’ll need to have the trans/tcase also in position so that the angles will all be right. Big boy pants time. I bought a new gasket for between the trans and tcase. So reattachment is coming soon.

Along the way I’ve been pushing and shoving on the motor getting it closer and closer to the final position.

Steel tube to sleeve the bolts arrived!

My list of excuses for NOT actually doing work is shortening. I got the motor to it’s “final” position including the transmission and transfer case with crossmember all tucked in. When I spent some time looking carefully at the front of the frame I noticed a few things:

• There was a broken weld on one of the front corners.
• The rivets holding the front of the frame to the sides of the frame had the heads cut off underneath. No wonder the welds broke.
• I’m putting much more stress on the frame than the original motor

For these reasons, i thought it would be best if I add some plate to reinforce the frame from the front back to behind where the motor mounts will be. There is going to be a whole different kind of stress in those areas which I doesn’t currently have.

One thing I do like to do when possible to is help others learn about doing this kind of thing. It seems to be that garage crafters are a dying breed. In this case I had some help from a co-worker’s son who I think has reached his limit of time at home under parents supervision. If I was in high school during the pandemic and was learning from home I think I’d have cabin fever as well by now. He is into forging so I got him to do some of the steel fab which needed to happen.

In my last steel run I got some 1/4″ plate 6″ wide. That seemed perfect for reinforcement and transfer case shifter fab so I cut him loose with some cardboard for templates, sharpie for marking, and cutting tools. He did a great job putting together some parts.

Generally the idea is to measure first, then cut out the first template from simple shapes (rectangles, triangles, arcs, … ) then try to fit the cardboard in and adjust. Here are the first templates for the driver side. Once you fit them, you can always trim some more off, but putting it back on… meh… may as well recut.

the front one looks pretty good:

The back one wasn’t bad but i had to put a bendy spot in it because the tire was kind of in the way.

The fit was good though…

The savvy among us might notice that the passenger shapes are dramatically different.

The passenger got a few revisions too

Cut out and tacked up. I didn’t want to finish weld anything until it was all bolted to the motor.

Not bad:

Then I fitted them both in the truck:

https://www.smugmug.com/app/organize/Gladiator/Motor-mount/i-4D7DHpp

I tacked them in while all bolted up and lined up, finally I pulled the motor back out to do final welding.

Here is is finished up. Two things I haven’t shown here:

1- the long reinforcement plates were put together by my helper, he also made a good gusset for the passenger front corner which can’t be seen in this photo. The reinforcement plates run from the front of the frame back behind the motor mounts and are hard welded all the way around.

2- I also added reinforcement (flat plate on driver side on top of the mount point and a bent bottom-side plate on passenger side) to the motor mount points to keep them from skewing. There here in the pic, just not in the descriptions above.

So… now a moment of truth! Pulled the motor back in, mounted it up.

So far so good!

I put the crossmember in, added the front clip and the HOOD…. ohhhhhhh…. nooooooo!

That’s not good. Hmmm…

Do we REALLY need the plastic cover?

There are some tall bits there. Any of that unnecessary?

What’s this thing? it’s the tallest bit and it lines up (doh!) with the hoods cross-support. If I can do something there then I’d gain quite a bit of room…

https://www.smugmug.com/app/organize/Gladiator/Motor-mount/i-Jq5Fm44

It’s the gas tank EVAP solenoid which pulls gas vapors into the intake… and it turns out that a lot of folks relocate them! Here is an underhood pic with it removed.

Looking good! Sharpie for scale

https://www.smugmug.com/app/organize/Gladiator/Motor-mount/i-8dbK7P7

Crisis mostly averted. I have the motor as low as I could get it and keep it level without putting mount points below the frame. I think it’s as good as I can do! I think it’s time to call this post a wrap.

With the motor mounted now I can finish up the crossmember and start figuring out the space in the engine bay, steering, brake mast cyl, shifter … whoa there nelly. Let’s save that for another day.