Rebuilding a 1972 RA21 Celica: I've Been Floored!

I'm still alive and this project is still moving forward, despite the lack of updates. I'm trying to find away to make these happen more frequently, but it's been difficult. When I'm not working my day job I'm working on this project so getting updates has been.. interesting.. Here's what I've been up to!

One of the more challenging parts of this project is dealing with rust. I'm in no way a 'body guy' and while I love metal working, my skills in this area are pretty limited. Last time I did anything close to it was high school.

That said, I wanted to give it a go and also hoped to reduce the overall cost of body work by doing a bunch of it myself. The majority of the stuff I'm focusing on is only items that are not part of the outside shell of the body. I didn't any of my mistakes visible to the rest of the world.

That meant that the majority of my focus was going to be the floors. There were also holes in the sill plates and various other parts of the overall floor.

I started by doing a few small sections in the rear floorboards. The drain holes in the floor had rusted out, so they had to be completely removed. Instead of putting a drain plug back in them, I just replaced the area with new metal. For some reason I didn't get pictures of these (yet). I learned a lot and found that my welding skills still needed some work. Welding sheet metal is .. interesting.

Once both sides of the rear floor were done, I jumped into the deep end of the pool and carved out the rusted area of the drivers side front floor.

In order to replace that floor, I first had to replace a part of the inner door sill plate the floor attached to as it was rusted through. After removing it, I found that the OUTSIDE of the front corner was also rusted out. That front corner wasn't very happy.

I made a new piece for the outside front, and replaced it where the rust existed. I then ground down the majority of the welds and primed it. This area will be covered by the fender in the completed project.

After that bit was completed I moved to the inside of that section, made a new piece and replaced that as well.

I could then finally work on the floor itself!

I started by making a template out of paperboard stuff (manila folders actually). Cardboard was a little thicker to work with, so found something a bit thinner. The goal was to use tabs and plug welds to try and mount the floor back to most of the original locations. This couldn't be done on the transmission tunnel side as the original floor was a single piece from one side of the car to the other.

Next up, I made a metal form based on that template. I had to beat a lot of it into submission as there is a drop in the frame rail that runs right down the middle of the floor.

It was all going fairly well, until I realized I needed to actually fit the transmission cross member to verify clearance. Turns out that the cross member protrudes into the floor. I knew there was a section to account for the exhaust, but didn't realize it was raised into the floorboard.

The floor had to be cut! Again!

I ended up making a boxed section that cleared the cross member as close as possible. This was as close to the original floor as I could get with the tools and skills I had on hand.