Floor Repair for non-Welders
Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:23 am
As I wire brushed the surface rust off the floor I found a 4 inch open slit on the passenger side along the inside sill. It was rusted through. Here’s what it looked like:
There was no “softness” in the floor, it was solid. I don’t weld and have no access to any equipment. My first plan was fiberglass it but some folks on the forum cautioned that the fiberglass can lift after a while, and also, the metal needs to be bare, fiberglass won’t stick to POR. So plan two was to treat the floor then rivet a flat piece of metal over the slit and cover it all with POR or something similar.
Then I found an article in the POR catalog that showed how they claimed you could make this repair using their material and I decided to try it. They sell a fiber mat, for $10 bucks or so, it is a very fine material but it’s just some sort of regular fiberglass. Anyway, they say to POR the area you want to patch, then lay down and soak with the POR multiple layers of the mat. So that’s what I did and it worked great. The POR dries rock hard. I can push and bang on the repair and it is solid.
Here it is after everything dried.
And after primer over the POR
I went on to do the same thing with a few other perforations I found, particularly under the pedals. It’s neat how you can see from underneath how the POR seeped through and formed a bond around the hole as it dried. Here’s a picture of the underside of the slit, you can see how the POR ran down as it dried.
Cheap and easy and I think it will outlive the car.
There was no “softness” in the floor, it was solid. I don’t weld and have no access to any equipment. My first plan was fiberglass it but some folks on the forum cautioned that the fiberglass can lift after a while, and also, the metal needs to be bare, fiberglass won’t stick to POR. So plan two was to treat the floor then rivet a flat piece of metal over the slit and cover it all with POR or something similar.
Then I found an article in the POR catalog that showed how they claimed you could make this repair using their material and I decided to try it. They sell a fiber mat, for $10 bucks or so, it is a very fine material but it’s just some sort of regular fiberglass. Anyway, they say to POR the area you want to patch, then lay down and soak with the POR multiple layers of the mat. So that’s what I did and it worked great. The POR dries rock hard. I can push and bang on the repair and it is solid.
Here it is after everything dried.
And after primer over the POR
I went on to do the same thing with a few other perforations I found, particularly under the pedals. It’s neat how you can see from underneath how the POR seeped through and formed a bond around the hole as it dried. Here’s a picture of the underside of the slit, you can see how the POR ran down as it dried.
Cheap and easy and I think it will outlive the car.