Well i'm finally making some real progress! i have most of the old pan removed but for the section along the front bulkhead; i didn't get all of the spotwelds on the first try and have some more drilling to do. as you can see it is not so easy to only drill through 1 layer of metal.
a LOT more rust/scale fell out when i finally removed the side parts of the pan and this is just more proof to me that what you see is only the tip of the iceberg! my car did not look that bad on the surface. Battery acid is a nasty thing and i wish a nice case of the runs on whoever failed to deal with leaky batteries way back when in this car.
removing the pan has been, for me, a very difficult process. as the experienced folks will be able to see i took a small shortcut along the lateral supports and broke out the grinder/cutoff wheel combo. the metal where the flange meets the pan on both sides was very thing and basically useless anyways. i will be POR'ing the interior surfaces of the lateral supports before welding things back together.
the only real bummer so far is the fact that i will have to do some manner of fabrication for portions of the lateral supports. if anyone has lateral supports cut out of a solid car i'd love to talk with you! i don't think the work i need to do on the laterals would justify dropping another $400 or so on new supports though. the biggest challenge here, i think, will be replacing the vertical portion of the lateral supports and duplicating the flange which is curved. (if anyone has ideas on that i'd appreciate your input!).
in removing the pan i gave up on the idea of drilling the spotwelds along the underside seam and just ran the angle grinder with cutoff wheel along the inside of the seam. i will still have to grind each spotweld down to remove the excess metal but this is, to me, vastly preferrable to trying to stuff a drill in at the right angles necessary. i have also gone through quite a few dremmel cutoff wheels and find them to be a lifesaver in the tight areas where a 4" grinder is just too big. i did find myself wishing for a nice air compressor and something like a 2" cutoff wheel attached to a small grinder.
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