Not a particulally interesting project I know but I thought I'd post it up anyway

This is my brother's Mk4 SWB Transit van, it's blue....



































and rusty



This (amongst other holes) is what we found when we lifted the wood flooring up.



Both rear chassis rails have rusted quite badly from damage (caused by the suspension "bottoming out" I think). That, has, in turn rusted through the floor.
The 2 out-riggery bits in the corners are completely rusted through and again taken the floor out with them, don't think there's any reason for this other than bad design by Ford.
Also the drivers side step has completely rusted through in 2 places.

It's not really worth fixing but I fancied a challenge and have wanted to have a go at something like this for a while. The engine (2.5D) looks pretty good too so we thought we'd have a go at saving it.

Some more pics:

 

It doesn't look *too* bad underneath so we though we'd chop some of the rotten floor out and see how bad the rails were.

Forgot to take pics of the floor chopping but this is what it looked like after :-



Basically from about 2 inches forward of the shock mount (bottom left of pic) to where the bit is being cut is all rotten, it doesn't look that bad in the pic but it was. After making a few cuts most of it fell out as clumps of rust

On the plus side the other side of the rail was fine so we leave that well alone. This is what it looked like after the rot was removed:-



We then had a rummage through the garage to find some metal to replace it with (this is a no-budget project!). Luckily I had previously stolen some drive array rack mounting rails from work which were pretty much perfect

We cut a couple of these up and clamped them in place :-



Looks pretty good

Next job is to clean all the edges up and seam weld it in place..

 

transit resto!!

now get the cossie in it and give it a roof chop, or pickup it

 

I did ask if he wanted a sunroof but he wasn't keen

 

pmsl at the sun roof,


choop the back off and make it a swimming pool

 

Welded the section of chassis rail in on Sunday, welding wasn't fantastic as the metal I was welding to was still a bit rusty (and I'm shit at welding ). It's a million times better than what was in there before though



I welded both sides but it was tricky to get the gun inside so it just turned into a big blobby mess





Oh well, won't see it again once the floor is down

We then started cutting out the nearside corner floor to see how bad it was.



You can buy that whole corner piece as a repair section but it's only the outer bit thats bad so we're going to weld in some more metal and leave it at that. Turns out it's been repaired quite extensively along the back before but it looks fine so we'll leave it.

Next job is to repair that corner and replace the floor then start on the other side


James

 

Transits Rule!!!

In the cab driving company I work saturdays we had some of these, undestructable!!
Managed 92 mph once with it

I do think you should make this a turbodiesel with an intercooler

Anyway, good luck

 

a transit & a car trailer/transporter would make its money back no bother, my mate gets aked to do jobs all the time & he makes a fortune