Bye Mr. Floor

The patch job was real bad. Once the rug was pulled up I found a couple of spots where the patch came up short and you could see the ground through the floor.

This wasn’t a rust hole, it was a “didn’t-have-a-large-enough-piece-of- metal-to-fill-the-hole-left-after-the-rusted-floor-had-been-removed” hole.

Seeing as there had been a repair job performed on the left side rear seat foot well.

When the carpet was pulled out, the majority of the floor was coated with a black tar like substance. Undercoat sealer?

I was scraping this stuff off of the firewall extension to find some spot welds and found rust instead and this goop was everywhere. What were these monkeys trying to hide…well, they did manage to hide it. I bought the car, didn’t I?

Without even removing the tar coat, once the carpet was out, you can see somethings aren’t quite right.

Why? Why all of the black stuff. I’m wracking my brain trying to remember if I’ve ever seen this stuff sprayed all over the floor of a car, inside the car, before. Is this something they do in the east where they have snow and ice?

Looking at the pictures, you may not really key into it but where the goop gets thicker and lumpy, those are the witness marks. Scraping those areas exposed the seam that I had seen from underneath.

It was during this time that I was thinking I could take this patch out, clean up the opening and refit the patch so I could do a better job of welding it in so there was no visible seam. Ignore the fact that I had never ever done work like this before, I was optimistic that I could do it. This was before I found the hole that I talk about at the opening of this post. Before that there was another discovery.

I didn’t know that the Mustang had a torque box in 4 places. The two front boxes and there are two more just in front of the rear wheel wells. They’re part of the floor just underneath the rear windows.

I had read that these can rust out as frequently as the front ones. I instantly got a headache wondering what it took to replace these if they prove to be bad.

I have work lights all over this car and I remember crouching down to take a look at the right rear torque box and a light catches my eye. I don’t have any work lights under the car. I’m using a flashlight and I’m holding it in my hand. I look up over the sill of the door and there’s the light. Look underneath the car again and I can see the light leaking through a gap in the floor. The patch job was so bad that these people didn’t even spot weld all around the perimeter of their own patch.

When I started scraping more of the coating from the floor and I found the gap that I mention at the top of this post, that was the final sign that told me that the best fix is to replace the entire floor.

Actually, one other reason to start fresh is the transmission that’s going into this car. It’s a Tremec T56 Magnum and it’s a monster compared to the little top loader that came in the car. I’ll have to do some tunnel mods to allow the Tremec to fit. With the impending mods and the already compromised integrity of this floor, a full replacement is the safer way to go.