Right back to the important issue at hand the rebuild of my little 1963 Cooper, lots of restless nights recently over the floor, I wasn't really happy with the way the new floor panels had gone in and I seemed to be chasing the metal worm up the tunnel, I'm spending a lot of time and money on the rebuild and I didn't want to end up with a car that was all patches so i made one of the most important decisions so far about the rebuild, I called Mini Machine and ordered a brand new MK1 complete floor, To my amazement they told me that they would be able to deliver it within four days, that included making it from scratch and delivering it to me in Gloucestershire, I was impressed and even moreso when at 8am on Thursday morning four days after ordering, my floor turned up. The quality of the wokmanship was brilliant, it had the sills fitted and even has the pipe and cable clips fitted to the underside, I would willingly recommend them to anyone thinking of going down the same route as me.
Right so back to the project, after I ordered the floor I had the horrible job of removing the floor panels that I had welded in and also to remove the tunnel, two days of cutting and grinding later I was left with a shell with no floor and no boot pan.
Before I finished for the night last night I used some Dintrinol cavity wax on the internal sill sections as once the new floor is fiited I'm going to have no access to this area, I also sprayed the internal section of the floor crossmember with another Dintrinol product to stop the worm dead in it's tracks.
So up bright and early this morning and shot of and picked up a good mate of mine who's a dab hand with cars and loves Mini's (I think he's had about five or six of them) he's now progressed to the American Muscle Cars. We spent about four hours getting the floor into the right position and clamped it all firmly in place, Ian's a bloody good engineer and everything got measured to the millimetre so I think the car will be straighter than when it came out of the factory, after the front floor was clamped in place we slid in the boot pan, then we fitted the subframe to the heel board mounts and then to the boot floor,took loads more measurements and then clamped everything into place.
Once we had double checked all the measurements for the tenth time we then used some aviation skin pins to fix the boot floor to the top of the heel board, I'll let the photo's tell the rest of the story
After all the panels were skin pinned together out came the welder and the fun begins, lots of spot weld and lots of grinding, seat panel to heel board first, then seam welded the front floor panel to the toe board on top and underneath, got to clean these welds up tomorrow as it was getting a bit late to start grinding, specially as the grinders been going non stop for the last few days removing the old floor. I have also dry fitted the new wheel arches everything fits fine
Hope youv'e all enjoyed the update as much as I've enjoyed doing the work today, it really feels as though I'm getting somewhere now
Edited by Mini Basher, 24 October 2009 - 07:47 AM.
