Time to weld!  Got to say I am really nervous about this.  I practiced a little more on the bits I cut out of the floorboard.

When I positioned the passenger side floor patch I found this.  The floorboard has been bent down a bit because of the giant rust hole.

I shimmed up the floorboards using scrap metal and wood.

That is much better.

Time to make this happen.  I used anything heavy I happened to have around to try and hold the patch down tight.  Then I tacked it.  To keep the temps down I blew each tack with compressed air.

Then I just kept tacking.  I had one blow-through on the transmission tunnel.  Metal was rusted thin and just melted away.  I filled the hole with with weld a little at a time. Shielding gas is running low so I switched over to the driver’s side.

I used the paper template I cut the patch from to grind the paint and rust where the patch will be welded.  Got the lines all lined up.  Floorboards were bent here too so I used whatever bits of wood and metal I had sitting around to shim up the floorboards to get the gaps tight.

Same drill here.  Tack, tack, tack.   For some reason this side was not going as well.  I found the wire was not feeding very well.  Cleaning the feed rollers and nozzle made everything go a lot better.  Once the stitch welds got close together I tried to run seams between them.

Well that looks like crap.   I need more practice at this.  Sometimes the welds went perfectly, others horribly.  But in the end I got the plate welded in.  Then I went back to the passenger side to finish it up.

Then I ran out of shielding gas.  I will have to get more before I can finish this up.