The Alpine Project : July 2021

Ready for the mean streets of Bedrock

Besides fenders and grills, the most endangered part of a “vintage” car (alright, old piece of sh*@#) are the floorboards. Of course, if you park a convertible in the weather for 30ish years, everything is endangered. Alphie spent her coma years mostly undercover, but her floorboards endured much rustage, like something cruising the mean streets of Bedrock.

I had already chewed into her floorboards when I was working on the center X frame, but I got down to business to fit the replacement skins I bought from David Lamerant up Canada way. Mr. Lamerant punches out metal panels with all the molded strengthening reliefs as the original, but he doesn’t cut them to size or bend them to fit the curves of the interior. (Honestly, he can’t because everyone’s Alpine/Tiger suffers different rustage configurations.) But he gives you plenty of extra metal around the edges to cover any situation.

After much grinding, cutting, sawzalling, cussing and a little bleeding, I wrested the old floorboard from the area where the Lamerant panel will sit. I cleaned all the undercoating from the X member since it was easily accessible and slathered on a coat of POR 15 to stop rust. Crackin’! The job took four hours, but it was the easy part.

The hole to fill

Fitting the patch panel took a day, not welding, just fitting. First, file folders. I masking-taped a flotilla of file folders to make a template to fit Alphie’s bod. Before Alphie, I laid the template on the Lamerant panel and marked the strengthening reliefs so that I could match the original placements as best I could. Next, I threw it down on Alphie’s invisible floor and penciled around the edges, allowing some space for screwing up. Attack the template with scissors and toss it back in to check the fit. Pencil in the areas that don’t fit, attack with scissors, check the fit, pencil the errors, attack with scissors, cut too much, fix with tape and file folder scraps, check the fit, pencil, scissors, yada yada… Eventually, I achieved “close enough” status.

File folders at "close enough"

Before I cut any sheet metal, I knew that I needed a down turned lip on the back edge of the panel where it will attach to the X member’s extension, the one crossing under the center of the seats. With a chunk of angle iron on the edge of the table, I measured and bent a 10mm 90° angle at the back edge of the Lamerant panel. With the paper template fitted back to the strengthening reliefs on the Lamerant panel, I Sharpied around the edge of the template with a half inch of extra space for screwing up. (Always plan on screwing up - fabrication 101.)

Oh, I did something that turned out to be prescient (SAT word, look it up): I marked on the X member extension where the strengthening relief bump sits in front of the driver side seat bracket, thinking it would help me line up the strengthening reliefs more accurately. By damn, it helped! Yeah, I was surprised too.

The template on the Lamerant panel
with the 90° lip at the back edge

Armed with two angle grinders, one with a cutting wheel, the other with a grinding wheel, I hacked into the Lamerant panel like I knew what I was doing. I’m always a little nervous about cutting into a perfectly good chunk of metal, especially one for which I paid a decent chunk of change. Damn the torpedoes…

I gave the first a generous margin for error, and I knew it wouldn’t fit. By comparing it against the passenger’s side panel, I check the placement of the strengthening reliefs. They were close and my goal was to get them even closer. Like the back edge, the edge of the Lamerant panel against the lower driver’s door sill needed an up-turned 90° angle for welding. I measured from the passenger side outside seat bracket to the passenger’s side lower door sill and compared it to my mark on the driver’s side and used the measurement to determine where to make the 90° lip. I, of course, gave room for screwing up because it would be easy to adjust to take up some slack but a royal pain to add some. Whaddaya know, later I had to take up a bit of slack to get the strengthening reliefs where I wanted them. Who woulda thunk?

Hacking underway with room for screwing up

As with the template, the sheet metal went in and out of Alphie many times on its way to “fit”. The trick is to GO SLOW! When the panel was in Alphie, I would mark where it was striking the perimeter, against the transmission tunnel, the area under the pedals, the door sill side and so on. I would grind down the marked areas and toss it back in the mark striking edges again. Mark, grind, mark, grind as I slowly got the fit tighter. At one point, I had to grind some areas inside Alphie, but it slowly took shape.

Menacing Edge - just looking can make you bleed

As you can tell in the pics, the “final” fit isn’t really final. I will have some more precise fitting to do when I eventually weld in the panel. I will also have some fabrication to cover some rust throughs and areas where the Lamerant panel and Alphie don’t quite meet.