It Begins

 My welder arrived this morning so after work I was round at the garage to start the serious stuff. After pulling it out of the box and spending about half and hour I nervously plugged it in and had a try. I played around for a bit with a test piece and soon got into it. Now was time to start welding the car for real!

Test Piece

Strengthening Strut Across The Door Posts

First job was to measure, cut, grind and drill a piece of box section to weld across the door. It may seem a little OTT for a floor pan change but I'm not taking any chances looking at the door sills, last thing I want is to get to the garage one night an find my beetle folded in half down one side. The main problem is that the outer door sill (or running board bolt line) is rotten and so has the heater channel closing plate so there is no good metal to weld to. So when I cut out one or the other some of the strength will be gone, particularly when the floor is out.

Preped For Welding

I decided that it would be best to leave the floor in and cut out the outer door sill first so I have something to when I do the heater channel bolt line. Before I left I marked the distance between the captive nuts for the running boards so that It gave me some thing to align the repair panel with. I was going to use an old running board for the alignment but I want to retain as much of the original  good metal as possible as the repair panels are not always a great grade of steel so just the very outside edge and bottom lip will be replaced. I decided not to replace it the entire width of the door but that may change once I get a better look and the state of it once I've cut the rot and filler out.

Bolt Distance Marked

Tomorrow, hopefully, will be cut out a weld in day for the door sill so we will see how that goes! My aim in to have the driver side sill, bolt line and floor pan in by the end of next week and most of the welding done by the end of the month, but we will just see what happens.