Ideas about making square bowl shaped floor
 

Hello. I promised to help a friend out with some patches for his floor pan in his Camaro but turned out the entire rear passenger seat foot well was rusted badly.
Replacement panels are hard to get over here so he asked me to try and make one.
It is basically a square bowl about 18 x 18 inches with two corners very rounded. The idea is to shape the tall rounded edge and corners, and then roll a few beads in the flat area for rigidity.

I hit a few problems with the panel trying to make it in one piece. I tried tucking and shrinking the rounded corners but ended up with cracks after a lot of tucking and hammering. I did the tucks with a tucking fork but after a while, the tucks did not seem to hold and leveled out the previous tuck with the next. Otherwise the bowl seemed to come along okay until the corner sort of work hardened or I shrunk it in a bad way.

What is the best approach? The bowl is about 6-7 inches deep. Should I have used a shrinking stump? Or is it necessary to heat the metal? The metal I believe was 18 gauge.

This is the first time I have had to try shrinking such a wide "flange".
I would like to make it in one piece if possible.

Thanks!

I presume you are making it in steel? In any case it sounds as if the metal has work hardened, so try heating the tucks to a red heat and work them while they are hot.

In aluminium; anneal the metal as soon as it demonstrates that it doesn't want to shrink,

Cheers Charlie

Yes sorry, steel. Are there any risks with heating too much etc?

Thank you for the reply.

If it is mild-steel, no.

Red to orange is hot enough,

Cheers Charlie

Make it in 5 or more pieces. Weld it all together
Mike

Attachment 44884You could make it with rolled edges and make the corners separately and weld them in similar to the photo.
Interesting I found the photo from a business selling these pieces, although you could make your own. http://www.cornerfill.com/

Thanks to everyone for the replies.

Seems like shrinking is the hard way to do it from your comments. I think I'll try out your method. Guess I need to dust off the TIG.

Did the part in one piece after all. It turned out okay for where it is meant to go. Still some planishing to make it look decent but my homemade air hammer fixture broke so I'll leave that to my friend if he wants to smooth it out.

https://s6.postimg.org/3kt7ifgvl/IMG...118_193138.jpg

The corners are MIG-welded from the outside and what you can see in the picture is the penetrating weld that will have to be finished.

https://s6.postimg.org/jj1x8kqj5/IMG...118_193129.jpg

Before making the beads I pre-stretched the areas. The beads were deeper earlier on but the piece got a really bad tin-can effect after shrinking the outer edge so had to try and wheel the flat parts carefully to try and correct it, which lost a bit of the depth of the beads. Maybe more pre-stretch of the beads would have helped with that also?

Here is a picture next to the rusted out piece.
https://s6.postimg.org/m0doftna9/IMG...118_192654.jpg
All in all, it was a fun piece to practice on as a beginner. Not gonna beat the price/time on a pre-stamped part though...and where it is around 60 dollars in the US it would probably be around 150 before it got here. It's still just life support for the camaro to keep it on the road. I think I need to get myself a shrinker/stretcher though.

That works, nice job. Once you dress those welds no one will never know.:cool:

Thanks! Learned a thing or two trying to make it so was a fun piece even though it took some time.