Father & Son Build - Removing Old Floor Pans

With the body out of the way, tear down on Nate's Baja Bug can continue with removing one of the worst parts of the car, the rusted floor pans. The rust was so bad on the passenger side that there wasn't enough metal to hold a battery! So once Sam and Nathan remove some of the parts on the chassis, like the brake lines, pedal stop and heater control cables, Sam guides Nate on cutting out the old pans. Then the pair work on removing the remnants of the pans from the tunnel, before cleaning out the rats nest inside the tunnel. Follow along and learn the easiest way of removing floor pans that Sam has learned with his 30 years of experience!

Video Transcript

Hi guys, I'm Sam. And I'm Nate. Welcome to our garage, where today we're gonna change out the floor pans—or remove them at least.

Although this might seem like a step back from where we were, this is where we should have gone in the first place. We shouldn't have gotten the car running and driving and stopping and going, but we did that just to get it to the show and to make sure that the transmission was good and the chassis... whatever. It's always fun to actually drive a car, but now we're going to get down to really making the car solid, starting with some pans. So, let's get to it.

Alright, um, 11mm. You want to disconnect the brake lines?

Yeah, should be 11. 11, 11, 11 for the front to rear. We'll replace that as well, even though it's solid. But is all the brake fluid just going to drain out or...?

Um, maybe. And you know what, let's just, uh, that off. No leaky anyways.

Yeah, okay. One thing that I do not know why hasn't been invented yet is like some sort of, like, electric wrench, you know, or like stuff like... this, like I'm... sure it's possible, you know that, you know?

Okay, at least it's a bit cooler today. It's a heck of a... yeah. But there's probably just going to be carpet over this huh? Yeah, somewhat of an interior, interior, but an interior, interior. Yeah. Gloves. You need your gloves. Yeah, I don't want to have to scrub them all.

Alright, um, clutch cable, accelerator cable, 8 mil, pain in the butt getting this out. So much of a pain. So, do you guys sell, like, new brake lines and everything?

Yep.

In front of the back and everything. I'm not entirely sure how you get this out. Well, we're not going to reuse it, so we can just cut back there.

Um, what was I doing? Oh, well, there goes all the fluids all over the ground. I'm guessing I'm going to have to bend it straight.

Possibly. Maybe bend out.

Alright, we can take that, these old heater cables, and throw these in. We just bending them into—what about these ones? There for now? Yeah, it's true. Uh, should be a 17 and a 17 right there.

And then the heavy-duty throw part of Volkswagen. There we go. Alright, uh, 13 mil. Why you can see I'm using manual tools, but alright, here we go.

Need to get a measurement from there to there and then from there to there so we know that this pedal stop goes back in the same spot.Oh, yeah. Alright, measure out. Measure over. Where's our papers of our work? Our measures over this... no. Alright, we're looking at 2 and 1/2 in from the front Napoleon's hat to the back edge of our stop and to the back edge about 3 in. Alright, so let's 2 and 1/2 with that. We can get to cutting—or you can get to cutting 'cause my shoulder is still jacked up and it probably will be for a long time. Oh, we should probably pull that pedal stop out. You want to get the big dog or the medium dog and a 13?

Now the fun part, you get to cut the floor pans out. Yay, yay floor pans. You want to come in right about here, so leave about two fingers ex—two fingers.

So should I just start with the... here? Yeah. Where's your safety glasses?

Probably good, like right at that little end right there. That actually looks so much easier to cut than the, um, tubing from the other day, huh? So you go... yeah. So basically like have that basically against the edge.Yeah.

Oh yeah, on the back, there's a lip right here. You can see it. Oh, yeah, you see it. See, follow that way and come in underneath here. You want to end up right about here, so... that's F cut as close to this edge right here as you can all the way forward and all the way to the front.

Very dangly now. Very dangly. How do I like that? That helps. So just try to stay away from the tunnel that far, okay? Yeah.

We didn't break our blade. I think it is... you broke our blade.

Look at that, water or something. Oh, the bottoms actually look better than the top. Alright, do this. Did just start like, kind of like next to the edge? Yeah.

Here we go. Here, it's like an awkward spot. I'm kind of getting through it. Nice. What? I said nice. Keep it up. My arms... yeah, no one said working on cars is easy, bud.

That's not going to be charged yet. Might have to go old school. Oh, yeah, I remember that. PL old-fashioned style. So much better in my opinion. Old-fashioned cord. How at it, buddy? So just go straight down that way and stand somewhere... oh, yeah, going to that side. Probably. Yeah, do the back first probably, and so like at an angle. My hands are shaken up too. That’s what happens?

I said I got a messed-up shoulder. It's not the best thing in the world for it.

Got one floor pan out. You said easy work. Yep. Want to cut off wheel be easier? Nope.

No, that is a good shell. Ain't that good, but it's the better out of the two. It was the better one.

Now the fun part is getting all that stuff out. You thought your hands were tired before, so how do you do that stuff? Hammer. Oh well, that sounds better than going. Yeah, you say that now.

Hi Nathan, how much fun is this?

Kind of fun.

Kind of fun? Well, yeah, once you actually know what you're doing.

Alright, so ideally when you're cutting out your old floor pan, you don't want to cut it right up against this lip. So this is the tunnel, this is our old floor pan. The closer you cut the floor pan to the tunnel, the less lip you have to work against when you're trying to peel it out. So that's why I like to leave an overhang because I can take that overhang, you can beat it up to get an access underneath that so that you can start popping out all the spot welds like Nathan's got done over here. So you can get all those pop welds popped out. As long as you have this lip to work up against, it's a lot easier to have that lip as opposed to not have that lip. So when I cut this side floor pan out, because the seat track was right along this edge, I had to cut in right along the tunnel, which again is not ideal, but that's why that side's already done and I'm still messing around with this side right here. And then this side should go much quicker, and then the front. And then it's actually seam welded here, seam welded here, seam welded in that corner. Same thing, there's a little seam weld back there, and then it's seam welded right here. But again, notice that we left this original triangle brace in place. Anytime you cut your floor pans out, leave this piece in place unless it's rusted out completely. Just leave this here. Overlap the lip on top of the new one with your new floor pan.

Nathan. I'm tired.

So, still need to come back with a grinder and a flap wheel and all the way across, all the way back. You can see there's still some of the old remnants of floor pans where they're seam welded and there's little spot weld areas. And you can see where it's overlapped and spot welded across here, all the spot welds there. You can see a big lip, so we gotta knock all these things down flat. Piece of the old floor pan still stuck there. Same thing here. Lots of this, we'll just grind all that stuff out, grind it all flat, clean it all up, hit it with some Corroseal to, uh, treat all this rust, and then once all that is converted out, then we're good to go there. However, along those same lines, I want to go through and we're probably going to pull the shift rod out, clean out a lot of the, uh, I don't know what's going to come through if you can see in there or not. But there's a lot of, a lot of junk inside the tunnel, so we're going to clean all the tunnel out.

Look at, uh... you can try and set it in place, but I guarantee you we're going to have some trimming to do.

Maybe trimming, you said?

Well, maybe I lied. Either way, we'll have to do some measuring, make sure it's all good to go, but trimming doesn't look like we got much trimming to do.

Yeah, it looks like it. Well, we'll have to check our measurements and make sure everything's good to go, but that actually looks pretty darn good.

What about the other side, Nathan? Come on, what about the other side? How's it looking? So, I'm going to duck the junk. Again, we'll still have to take our measurements, and we got a little bit of cleanup to do on the edges, but floor pans, floor pans, no holes. Yeah, look at that, that's weird. And that's all it is. That's all your floor pans are—pieces of metal that were bent a certain way. Yep... and just like that, we go from rusted holes in floors to solid floors.

Alright, Nath, what are you doing now?

Cleaning out more stuff. I mean, this is basically what we were doing on episode one.

Oh, nice. Battery charging it. Paint can opener. Oh, that's actually probably useful.

Yeah, it is. I'll keep that too. Alright, so yeah, we can see some of the ickies and gickies and yuckies and uies that are in there, and some water, and I'm assuming that the clutch cable busted loose, so that's why they cut that opening there. Those guys already broke the brazes on those, I'm going to break the brazing on there.

My car, why don't I do it?

Alright, beat it out.

There you go. Not even difficult at all, that it doesn't look like it even did anything right there.

Just try a different spot. If that spot's not going, it's probably too free right there. Once you go in here, over there. That one's free. There you go. Beat it out or pull it out.

I would say beat it out or try it out. More gunks and junks.

A vest. What are you talking about? A vest. A vest.Are you a pirate now? Pirate Nate. Arrr, Matey.

Yeah, I'm going to start rinsing the front some more, and we'll get some more gunk to the back.

Alright, we've got all the floor pans out. New floor pans are just sitting in place for now. We still have a lot of prep work to do to the tunnel, to the chassis. Obviously, we pulled off the rear bumper, we pulled out the engine. At this point, we're still going to pull the transmission, pull the axles, pull the trailing arms, pull the spring plates, torsions. We've got a whole bunch of work to do suspension-wise before we ever worry about putting floor pans in. I don't like the way these control arms sit, so I am going to probably cut out the pivot points on the arms. We've got a lot of work still to do. Um, these floor pans do sit in the Brazilian pans. However, going through and measuring from our tunnel out to the holes, they still need to be trimmed about a quarter inch at least. Anyway, that's why we take measurements before, because if you were just to set this floor pan in place not knowing any better and then just welding it in, then you go to put the body on, it's just not going to... and nothing lines up. So measure beforehand and set the body in place and bolt up every single hole before you weld it in place.

So, is that what we're going to do or are we just going...?

Yes, we are. No, we're going to measure, trim, and then we'll set the body in place temporarily, bolt everything in, get it welded across, pull the body back off, finish up the welding.

So, we're probably going to have to get some people over, possibly.

Yeah, while now, without the engine in the way, without the transmission in the way, headlights, bumper, headlights, etc., might be a bit easier, now that the body's actually fully unbolted.

Uh, that would have probably made a big difference. I might have been able to just turtle the body off beforehand.

That's a wrap for this day's worth of work. One step closer to having a properly built chassis.

Yeah, or whatever it's worth. Yeah, and then we can work on air conditioning, air conditioning lines, uh, fuel injection, which is a very big thing.

Yeah, well, we'll just do the prep work for the fuel injection for now, but we still obviously have a whole bunch more work left to do. So on that note, life's full of good people. If you can't find one, be one. Later, guys.