Ok, here's an overview picture of the 2nd of the pictures I posted earlier. This gap is at the base of the door post.



The only explanation I can make for it is they made it so the welders could tack down the floor pan onto the brace which runs accross the rear of the sill. They could have use a couple of small holes rather than a huge gap though!!

I decided to edit this and add a picture of why I am working on this in the first place - the rear door seal leaked and the floor got wet and rotted the wood flooring.



(this is an older picture - the seam sealer is still in place) It's not severely rusted, but when I scraped some of the paint off adjacent to the little rusty gouges in the paint, the rust had spread a bit to either side under the otherwise solid looking paint, calling for drastic action!

While you are in there you really need to remove all of that nasty pink house insulation.That is also holding dampness against your upper body sheet metal.....

.........Wookee

I've seen that before. For some reason I thing they were all that way with the big gap. I wonder if they used the same floor pan and changed the door support at some time. Yours looks like it may have been damaged at some point, but it's not that bad. you can use nearly any of the ideas above to fill it. I personally wold tack weld an "L" shaped piece of sheet metal over the hole, seam seal it inside and undercoat it on the bottom. I would be willing to bet the rear tires spray a lot of crud right at that point.

I'm very curious what the rest of the floor pan will look like as I work my way forward with replacing the floor. As far as I can tell, the only part that got wet was at the rear doors.

I didn't see *any* evidence of mechanical damage around the door post areas; keep in mind that the phosphoric acid that I'm using turns the metal either a stark white or a jet black, so everything's about 20x uglier looking than it really is. You can see both extremes of coloration along the floor pan seam. I didn't bother to clean up any of the stains and dust from the decomposed plywood yet either, so everything looks brown.

I still don't understand why a conversion van would have all those deep linear gouges through the paint on the floor; it's almost like the van was used for carrying heavy things for a while, then was converted. Anyone ever seen anything like that before? I'm debating whether there may be more rust creep hidden under the paint... should I strip it *all* off?

I think I'll try what you suggested for the gaps and tack weld a couple of strips of metal in, then seal them.

It still boggles my mind that Dodge would have jammed these huge wads of Sealer in the gaps rather than closing them up more conventionally, especially when there's ample evidence of manual MIG welding in those very spots.

Clear skies!