What were the folks at GM thinking? Rant!!

I remember going to Sea Isle City (for the family vacation) in our '71 Impala- it had been raining all day/evening... and Sea Isle doesn't have a sewer/drainage system.

We started to go down a street that was flooded from one end to the other, and had to put our feet on the seats to keep our legs from getting soaked from the water coming in through the floorboards

 

Drop down 2 posts and look at the project koolkemp has taken on then whine some more about replacing floor pans.

re·store [ ri stáwr ] return something to original or previous better condition.

 

I felt bad because I had no shoes then I met a man who had no feet. So I said, can I have your shoes?

 

I was thinking wasn't 51 Connecticut winters a hint?

 

Sorry wrong thread.

CRUISER

 

same drama with my 56 ford wagon
wacked in some EMS panels
driving the wheels off it and SMILING
get on with it ......

 

I'm not really whining, it's not a hard fix. It was just hard to believe that the designers would put something in that would never dry if it got wet. I can't bitch to much. The car war well undercoated and the rust is confined to the inside of the floor pans. Todd

 

They still do it on new cars. The average lifespan of a car is something like 10 or 12 years now.
My girlfriends '04 durango had an awful smell but the carpet was dry. She thought there was a dead rodent in the heater but i knew it was water.
It ended up that the door seal made a bend right below the transition from roof to a-pillar rain gutter. When you bend c channel like that it flares out. The flare caught the water, and it then rode all the way down the a pillar and down to the floor inside the rubber door seal were it was deposited under the rug in the jute. Turns out the rug has a rubber underlayer to prevent the jute from getting wet, or, to prevent it from drying out too.
They wanted a 150 bucks for the door seal. I bought a 3 dollar tube of silicone

 

No. No. No. No. You got that all worgn! Wait until the rust eats away at the locks and you cain't even get the door to close at all without bungie cords hangin' out'n it!!

I remember when the safety blitzes where held in downtown Woodstock ON...ended up seeing all manner of rust buckets pulled off'n the streets..trunks and doors a'flappin', people using 2X4's to hold seats up on rusted frames..let alone floor pans, rusted out trunks...no wheelwells, no brakes..almost doing the Fred Flintstone maneuver....

 

Welcome to old cars! Theres your old floors, old engines, old rearends, old tranny, old glass, old chrome, old nuts, old seats, old gages, old wiring, old bolts, old radios, old rockers, old qtrs, old doors, old fenders, old lights, old radiators, old paint, old hoods, old trunks~~ECT, ECT! Oooops forgot about some OLD FLOORS!

Most of us old farts find it much easier to deal with than the OLD LADY!

So get up off that old ass and get'er done

 

I don't really like to excuse all the strange stuff car manufacturers have done in the past, but in the case of the 1959 GM (and offcourse 1960, as they are more or less the same) lineup, they were rushed through the design process and engineering, into production after the 1957 Chrysler lineup came out. They never had time to do anything properly. (they still ended up better quality-wise than the 57 Chryslers though)
And as mentioned above, cars weren't made to last 60 years (they still arent' btw)

 

I love rust! If driving old stuff was easy everyone would do it!

 

In ColoRODo, home of rust-free cars, you can have one with rust or one without rust...depends on where it was sitting...or if it had windows in it.


My '60 Chevy wagon, above, sat outside for 20 plus years with driver's window missing, note floor patch with galvanized. There's nothing under it...both sides are like that. This is my next project...




Then again, I just put this '60 Pontiac (below) wagon back together...the floors are perfect andit had rubber mats over jute...of course, it's been inside a garage since 1983...while the previous owner tried to "restore" it...



Even in ColoRODo, rust never sleeps...!!! It simply goes with the territory...either you fix it...or get rid of the car and start with something a lot later.

R-

 

Heck saw a guy at the car wash yesterday with newer commercial Ford pickup washing his floorboard out with hose,Just imagine how long the cheap metal they use today will last. All the older 60s Chevy trucks had the rubber vinyl floor covers and lots of guys washed them out this way. Back in the day when those old trucks were used as work vehicles it was easier to keep mud and dirt out than carpet. Most old cars with the vinyl trunk mats rusted out underneath because of worn out leaking rubber seals. Fix the floor pan and after that replace all the door and window weather stripping,check for all the hole grummets in the firewall and by then you will forget about bitching about the way the car was built in the first place.

 

yeah,rust in a 51 year old car,the bastards. what the hell were they thinking.

 

At least with a car like a '60 Chevy you can buy a repro replacement floor pan if you so choose.

 

Two quickies involving 59-60 Chevrolets:
My 60 sedan delivery going over a railroad track and the rear bumper hitting the ground.The frame rails rusted out at the rear kickup and just dropped.

Went to look at a 59 el Camino that was in a guy's back yard for years.Would have required felling several trees to get it out.Passed on it. The guy that bought it went in with a wrecker and when he picked it up by the front wheels it broke in two.

 

One floorpan,... I'm envious!! ; The entire bottom 20" of my '40 pickup cab had to be replaced..... Northern Truck parts made that a lot easier to deal with.......

4TTRUK

 

The same thing all the other makes were thinking. State of the art auto design for that time.

My dad bought a 60 Bel Air hardtop in 1960 . He was happy that it had the rubber mats. He said if it was an Impala with carpeting he's have to go buy rubber floor mats.

 

Seems to me like the guy with no legs has it best - no feet OR shoes to worry about.

ok, all kidding aside-

It's not like GM sat down and said "make it so it rusts in 10 years". It's simply that, while designing, that kind of longevity is out of consideration. They don't build 'em like they used to- and in fact they probably never did.

 

When I built my '40 Chevy I replaced everything from the firewall back to the tool well in the trunk. Not fun but it should last for the rest of my life.

The older cars with cowl vents are the worst offenders. The gaskets leak water down the inside of the firewall under the inside trim and it settles under the carpet in the low points of the floor pans. After a few years it all turns into holes. I weld up the vents and install Vintage Air units.

 

2000+ posts on the HAMB, and you're SURPRISED to find rust in a 50 year old car??????

WTF?



Ohh.....and Merry Christmas.

 

Check and see if there's a "recall"....maybe GM will replace the floors for free. After all, its only been 50 years.

 

Stop getting into your car with snow on your shoes...

 

I would find a new hobby if rotted out floorboards were that big of a deal

 

I've seen '59-'60 Chevy 4-door hardtops rust so bad just sitting that you could pull the back window out, it was loose. That means the entire back deck has to collapse a little....


And honestly, have you ever had a GM car that hasn't had some lazy or asinine engineering on? Every frigging one I've ever had there's been something I've had to work on that's been more of a pain in the ass than it should be. Even my '50 - I went to pull the radiator support and found I had to drop the sway bar to get to the bolts, because they were cap screws.

 

Be happy, it could have looked like my 62 did.

Tony

 

I remember driving on the Long Beach freeway about 1966. I saw a 59 Chevy that had no quarter panel metal below the belt molding. You could see straight thru the car.

 

This last winter I replaced front and back floor pans in my '63 Biscayne with that rubber flooring also....
Actually I have been looking VERY hard for a replacement rubber floor for it, but to no avail...only carpets available...
However, if my memory serves me correctly, in the 60's GM was making so much money that the last thing they were concerned about was quality or long term life of their cars...in fact I believe it was that period where the went with the 12 month/12,000 mile guarantee on NEW CARS....
Good luck on your project....Biscayne's are really Cool !!!
Cheers....

On Edit: I am far from being politically correct, or perfect in my posts, but the several posts above making fun of handicap people is a pathetic cheap shot at best.
Not cool at all in my opinion.

 

i'm kinda glad my 59 elky has rust holes in the floor pan, thats the way the water runs out when it leaks......................... i'm just sayin:<)