Category: Welding

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Patching and Painting the Floor Pan on my Range Rover Classic (Post #687) 1/12/2025

In this week’s post I continue my work on the floor pan. This time it’s patching the panel wear rust munched it’s way through. I patched a roughly 4″ x 5″ piece and three holes. One was about the size of a quarter the other about the size of a nickel.

I made up a template cut it out for the 4×5 hole. For the smaller holes I drilled them out to make them uniformly round. This helped greatly with making the patches. The third hole I just welded shut by building up the weld to bridge the hole.

I had a bit of trouble getting the welder dialed in. I haven’t changed the setting but for some reason it the welder was being difficult. Once dialed in (set back to the original settings) I managed to get good penetrating welds.

Once it was all patched up I got some paint on every thing. I was also able to get some rattle-can rhino-liner/stone chip sealer on the Z bar. I still believe this is crucial to keeping the rust at bay for a few more years. I will likely put a bunch of seal sealer in there as well. Belt and suspenders if you know what I mean.

My next episode will be getting the cross beams installed. This will be a challenge I can assure you.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

https://youtu.be/uoWbYqQfFh0
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Floor Pan Repair on a Range Rover Classic: Part 3: Z Bar (Post #684) 12/22/2024

In this episode. Grady and I get the Z bar welded to the floor pan panel. After the debacle of last week was finally solved, we had some new tools and great grounds to work with. These allowed for our plug welds and our panel butt-welds to hold.

I also noticed I had the heat up too high on the welder. Once I lowered that, the welder didn’t blow through the panel. There were a LOT of welds. We went through a half tank of shielding gas. And in the end we ran out of gas. So next weekend I’m going to need to get down to the welding supply house and get a fresh tank of gas.

If you remember the first video we determined we needed to cut about an 1/8th of an inch off one side. It turned out to be closer to 1/4th of an inch when I finished. We used the pinch vise clamps, some hammering, and a lot of bending to get the panel flat enough to make good welds.

Grady got to weld quite a few welds. I think I need a second welding mask so I can watch his technique and help him to get better. He did a pretty good job after he got the hang of it. Its fun for me to see him engaged and wanting to learn.

We have 2/3rds of the sides on now. Our first task will be to get the last one welded on and to fit it ONE MORE TIME. We fitted the panel and I’m 92.6% sure the panel will go in cleanly and fit properly.

That’s all for this week.

We wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering. Like and subscribe.

https://youtu.be/F3x3iota0Dw
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Floor Pan Repair on a Range Rover Classic: Fitting the bed Part 2 (Post #683) 12/16/2024

This week is part two of Grady and I trying to get the damn Z bar attached to the bed. We had a helluva time getting our welds to stick. In the end it came down to me removing a lot of the primer and paint I spent so much time getting into place.

The welds were not taking because the ground was poor. It required me to grind off a lot of paint and to get new vice clamps to hold the steel together.

Taking that paint off was no challenge for the power tools. It was painful to me because my ultimate goal in all this was to put this floor bed back together BETTER than it was before. The better is that I don’t have to worry about it rusting out.

Once I get it back together, I am going to spend significant time getting it recoated with paint and rust preventative coverings. This may be challenging with winter now upon us. It was 70F today but it is in the thirties in the mornings. I’m hoping for a warm spell around the new year so I can get the paint applied.

That’s about it for this episode. Like and Subscribe.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

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Floor Pan Repair on a Range Rover Classic: Fitting the bed Part 1 (Post #682) 12/10/2024

In this post my grandson and I work on the floor bed to get it to dry fit. The first thing we needed to do was to get the Z bar into place. This required us making the side rail straightened and in some places cut some useless steel off.

The next thing we needed was to tack weld the Z bar into place. This was quite the challenge. I tried tacking and it didn’t take. I finally got my weld to hold. I let Grady weld too. His welds would not stick either.

After some frustration we determined that likely we didn’t have a good ground. I put in a lot of effort to get this steel painted so it wouldn’t rust. That unfortunately also prevented us from having a good ground for our welding.

I ground off a lot of paint. This is going to be a problem. The whole reason for the paint is to prevent the damn rust in the first place. So once I get the Z bar in place I’m going to need to paint everything again.

We finally got the Z bar into place and tried to fit the panel. We are about an 1/8 to a 1/4 of an inch off. This is going to require some additional cutting and more fitting to make sure we have it right before we start attaching the braces.

This is part 1 of 2. We spent WAY too much time with welding and prepping. So I cut this down to under 30 minutes.

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Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

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Footwell Repair Part 5: Floor Panel Repair, Panel Finally Installed (Post #664) 7/27/2024

Yes! I finally have the panel welded in. Is it pretty, oh hell no. Is it water tight, not even close.

I will liberally apply seam sealer. You’ll see that in my next video. I had a helluva time getting that panel held in place. I finally came up with a solution. Use a 50lb bag of sand to hold it in place while I set some welds. This could not have worked better.

I was also able to hammer the panel grooves flat. I went and got my grandson “Thumbtack” and had him hold a 10lb weight against the panel while I hammered on the opposite side. This work pretty well I guess? I don’t know. If I was better at body work I would have built a jig and made a panel with the same grooves. But I’m not a good body worker.

I covered as much of the panel in primer as I could reach. What I learned when I crawled underneath to spray primer on the panel was a big bummer. I found the welds had heated the rubber covering on the transmission tunnel. This caused the rubber to separate from the panel and you can guess what’s going to happen under there.

No, that was a terrible guess….really? It’s going to rust, rust a lot. I haven’t a clue what I’m going to have to do to get to this area and get it covered with paint and rust preventative coverings.

As I’ve said it a dozen times, every job creates two more jobs.

I have a shout out to Tumbleweed Garage [Youtube]. He’s working on a 1948 Willy’s Truck. I enjoy his work.

Thanks for reading, like and subscribe, and Happy Rovering.

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Footwell Repair Part 4: Floor Panel Repair, Failing Spectacularly at Metal Working (Post #663) 7/20/2024

I started the day with glorious visions of finishing the welding on the Floor Panel. All I managed to accomplish was spectacular failure.

Things that worked:

  • I had some luck with my homemade plug weld drill bit. It worked well at removing the layers of primer and seam sealer I had foolishly laid down.
  • Welding. Some of my welds actually held pretty well. I managed to get a good ground and the welds stuck until I stressed them too far. On second thought, maybe that means the welds sucked.
  • My home made air hammer … hammer bit stretched the metal a lot. But the shape I needed and the one the I got weren’t going to work.

Things that didn’t work:

  • Welds. As before, they popped when put under a lot of stress.
  • My understanding of metal working,
  • My spinal cord did not like the constant bending over.

After I had the panel welded in place I tried to apply my air hammer on the panel to get the metal to stick. I also tried using self tapping screws to get the panel to stay in place. This may have worked better if I had shaped the panel better.

All in all, it was a waste of wire and gas. I’ve since cut the panel down smaller. I cut all the plug welds off. I’ll try edge welding when I start return to make the fix. Changed the way the transmission tunnel weld was fixed. It’s now straighter less “bowl shaped”. I’m pretty sure I’ll need help holding the panel in place while I make the first few welds.

Range Rover 1

Okierover 0

That’s it for this week. Like and subscribe.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

https://youtu.be/-0hDDW1aPcE
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