Flipped, Sealed and Undercoated

With the floor pans welded in, my next task was to seal up the gaps left around the welds.

The frame is flipped over

Gap between the center beam and pans 

The pan rests on an inch wide shelf, but even after it was welded in, there was a space between the surface of the pan and the surface of the shelf.

Of course, this has to be sealed, or water will get in and the whole point of replacing the pans will be moot after the first rain.

Rust already

Beam and floor pan intersection

In fact, because it took a couple of weeks (one of which was rainy) to get to this, a very small amount of rust had already formed on the freshly ground and welded spots.  It took some doing but I managed to clean up all the rust and injected a bead of silicone sealant all down the length of the pans on both sides.

The primer cracked on the beam

After primer on the bare steel bits

I'll have to seal up the other side when I turn it back over, but for now it was time for the paint.  It's undercoating, actually, so when it dries it has a sort of rubberized surface that will hopefully resist the chipping and cracking from rock and road debris.  I am going to spray the entire frame with undercoating at this point, leaving the parts that go back to be painted with a more conventional high-gloss black paint.

Sanding it down helped

The new undercoat is smooth

The first coat on the bottom side I put down wasn't really a coat at all, but a targeted use of the primer to cover all the really bare metal spots.  This worked well enough on the bare metal, but when I laid it down on the previously undercoated center beam, the result was a crackled mess.  Resolving not to make matters worse, I elected to just let this dry and when sanded it down lightly before repainting it with undercoating it looked fine.

Even on the center beam

One half is done

I used three cans of undercoating.  One went on the center beam, and the other two went to the sides.  By the time I was finished, it looked better than I had expected.  There were a few wrinkled spots where I hadn't cleaned up some substance or other, but even those spots eventually dried nicely.

Voila! Both sides now!

It really does look slick

It's not like they are going to be visible anyway.  As I've said before, my objective is not a show car, but one that it well assembled, clean and tight.  So far, so good.

Next, we'll turn it back over to seal and paint the other side.  Then it's on to re-assembly.  The freshly repainted front beam and trailing arms will go back on and that transmission, long ago re-painted and now filled with fresh gear oil, will finally be re-installed.