Floor Pan halves removal

6th September 2012
Ok, so ordered the new floor pan halves from Status VW in the UK.  Arrived the other day

Couldn't work out the best way to drill out the spot welds, so thought I'd try HSS metal drill bits on the seat runners. First job, clean off the paint to see the spot welds.  If you have a thick strip of seam sealant, chances are its hard so knock it off with a hammer and chisel. I went for a sanding disc as per the pictures to try and remove the minimum amount of metal possible.

So you should see something like this when you have run the sanding disc along.  Doesn't take many seconds.  The black dots are the factory spot welds that need drilling out (although occasionally there are ones that you can't see)

 

 

Starting with a 2.5mm drill, drill into the spot welds.  For the seat runners, I was happy to drill al the way through as the pan halves would be thrown out.  After drilling the hole, I then increased the size in 1mm ish stages up to 6mm.

This allowed for the frame to be lifted from the pan as shown

Although this worked, it takes alot of time and you can see that the frame will need remedial work to straighten out.
 So, I didn't want the hassle when doing both pan halves.  Looked around, and found these spot weld drill bits.  They were around £6 each so I ordered 2 (6mm size).

Armed with these, we took to the first floor pan half.

To make life easier, we used a reciprocating saw with a metal blade to cut around the pan and remove a large section.  Care should be taken to not cut through the lip we want to retain, this is quite tricky near the seat runners (next time we will remove these first).

We started removing spot welds across the rear frame.  Once we drilled some out we used a flat blade screw driver to help spilt the pan from the frame.

Continue until all the old pan is removed.