I've nearly gutted the interior and I'm planning the full floor pan replacement. I've read several threads on this subject and my son just graduated UTI Body repair and has a welding cert.

Is this replacement as intuitive as it appears?
Where can I expect "gotchas" to pop up?
Is there a video or reference anywhere for this exact body part replacement?

Thanks!

Wade

IMO its the best place to start if you have never done metal work before. You will spend several days drilling out spot welds. Keep you panels tight when you weld them. Your results will all depend on your patients and attention to detail. Test fit, test fit, test fit.

Good luck.

https://firstgenfirebird.org/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=259621#Post259621 .There are pics in this thread about floor replacement.

Took me 3-4 hours to have mine out everything cleaned up and ready for a new one it is probably a 1 day job total and I am not a body person.
No need to drill every spot weld, cut floor about 1 inch from the edge and use a curved bit on a air hammer to roll old metal off the spot weld then use flap disk sanding pad to remove rest of metal. Only had to drill spot welds on frame rails and where it attaches to front toe section in a couple spots.
I have a coupe so there was no need to remove all of the braces underneath the car, but a buddy of mine did his vert and used the same methods.
Just finished mine recently

Forgot to mention one problem I encountered was the bumpstop bracket didn't fit under the tunnel, tunnel was formed wrong so I removed bump stop from trunk pan to install floor then I altered the stop to fit to the tunnel, also did a little notching in the front corners due to original floor being under not over, other than that it was a drop in and weld item, I figured it wasn't worth the time to save seat pans so I cut through them and will replace with new,

Thanks for the tips.

I'm not a stranger to welding or bodywork and I like to know in advance, if possible, where I can expect those gotchas to bite me.

So, what about bracing? not much of the car is aligned properly. doors are installed. Brace or not to brace?

Thanks for the responses!

Wade

Also for extra I have braces under both rockers, starting to cut out firewall to smooth it out with metal, I did some filler on it to see what it might look like

bump stop cut out Im not sure if you can tell of the off shaped tunnel but it is a stamping problem, nothing serious, trunk pan braces for the tank were the bigger problem and I havent fixed those yet, they were 1/2" short of touching the roll pan

Welding question. Flux core or solid wire w/ gas?

My son says it doesn't matter. I think it does. What do you think?

Your son is wrong...for auto body work it matters a lot.

Solid wire with gas MIG all the way...

Flux core wire works very poorly for thin gauge sheetmetal...expect frequent blow-outs, excess spatter and slag to grind off, welds full of pinholes, etc.

A properly set up gas MIG with sizzle like bacon and give smooth, clean welds with little spatter and minimal blow-outs.

x2 Tried Flux ... did not work well for small guage steel.
Gas MIG works much better. I'm just a beginner though...

use mig with gas....I tried flux core wire back in june on my car
and it did what they say, blow out, excess spatter lots of slag
to grid off, not worth it.

Not sure if this will help, but there is a video series on YouTube by v8tv. They do a full restomod on a 69 Bird. They did a video on floor replacement. Here's the link: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X1pegxYfEEY

Rich