Floor plugs

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Paul02

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Whats the point of the large round floor plugs that are in the original floorpans of my coupe. I can only think that they are for some sort of drainage if the car becomes waterlogged ? or am I on the wrong track .

Anyway if I repair any of the floors with repair panels will they have these or do you just forget these nowadays .

Cheers Paul
 
I think to drain the car during the paint process but am not sure. The replacement panels generally do not have them and that's better really.
 
It’s just my best guess but I believe the holes are jig / fixturing holes that are used to align panels when they are spot welding the floor pan together. I don’t believe they dip cars or even just floor pans in paint because I’ve never seen paint pooled inside of rocker panels and I’ve certainly done my fair share of uni-body structural work. ~ John Buchtenkirch
 
floor repair panels

do have the indentations for the plug areas. At least those sold by Walloth. In the middle of that indentation is a raised area, 1"x1". It appears to me to be a fixing point for the stamping process that later gets removed.

Karmann, BMW, and Porsche dip the bodies in a phosphoric primer bath. Bmw recently released a documentary , shown on the discovery channel, on the Z4 which showed the process.

Porsche showed the process in a film entitled, "made by hand" sometime in the very early 60's and is on youtube in the first part of several.

Both show essentially the bodies and parts going through an assembly line through an enclosed area, in what I call a large trough . Most of the body is submerged and more recently there are sprayers on the roof areas.

That phospheric primer is light grey/ beige. I always assumed that coating was what can be seen in select areas on some original cars.

My vote is a conservative approach- put it back as original as practical with the advances in corosoion protection now available from lessons learned .
 
I have a dealer brochure for the "New 3.0 CS" dated 1971. Inside it has a photo of a body being dipped with the caption "electric phosphor bath". Next to that there's an illustration showing the "cavity sealing procedure" depicting a wand spraying the inside of the rocker. I've looked inside the rockers of the car I'm restoring using a borescope and there does appear to be some sort of coating. It looks to be the light grayish tan used as a primer on the under body before the rubberized coating was applied. At any rate, we all know that forty-plus years of moisture eventually overwhelmed this process.

I've heard that the floor pan holes were to allow the dipping solution to drain but the fixture theory makes sense as well. On my car I'm debating whether to weld the drain plugs in place, as others have done, or just use ample seam sealer.
 
An alternative

to welding and a modern approach, would be the use of structural adhesive. Watertight and adds integrity. The added benefit is that it looks original.

Not to digress too far into Porsche rust lore but relevant is that there several body builders early on before Porsche decided for several reasons to bring that process into their own production, D'Iterin was one who made roadsters/ convertibles. Their use of sealers was to overseal to the point that even today those cars don't have the inherent problems by Karmann.

To coin a popular beer commercial phrase with a twist, "seal well my friend."
 
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