05 E350, starting from scratch...this may take a while

Psalm42 · 09-12-2016, 08:06 PM

So I'm staring my build thread, very excited to finally be this far lol.

Here is my "Welcome Mat" introduction thread that goes into detail about that start of this project (still haven't come up with a name for her yet)

forums/f46/hello-from-soflo-17963.html

So at this point I needed to get the interior completely emptied and cleaned to figured exactly how back the rust is...it's pretty bad..but in areas I wasn't expecting lol. The driver and passenger side have holes in the floor with rust climbing all over the front, quite a few spots of exposed rust in the back and a bunch of spots everywhere I can see the paint start to bubble. Tonight I did a deep clean to start and tomorrow I'll be going through it with a wiz wheel and cookie disc to get almost all of it off, welding in some sheet metal to cover the holes and then going through the whole floor with Ospho rust treatment.

Psalm42 · 09-12-2016, 08:10 PM

Here is what I did to get the exhaust to work

86Scotty · 09-13-2016, 06:48 AM

Wow. That rust is pretty serious. Where did this van come from? Miles? I've hardly seen any as new as 05 with a completely rusted through floor. Have you taken a close look at the rain gutters all around the top? I wonder if it wouldn't be less work to just do a body swap from a high mileage but rust free van?

Psalm42 · 09-13-2016, 07:50 AM

It was a work van around south Florida, 216k miles. Rain gutters looked decent though. I'm still contemplating pulling the topper off to get a real good look at everything on the top end. The floor will be "easy" ish lol, most of the rust (minus the big holes in the front) will be taken care of by the Ospho which actually converts iron oxide (rust) into iron phosphate (bare metal), so all the spots that are surface rusted will be back to bare metal which I'll then paint over liberally with some good ole bed liner. The front foot wells will need to be cut out and replaced though.

Psalm42 · 09-13-2016, 07:52 AM

It used to have 3/4 plywood screwed into the floor with no prep and no protection and the original barn doors and back doors had been broken into with what looked like crowbars or pry bars, and then the customer I had bought it from had it sitting outside for I believe a year or so and bam rust everywhere and mold everywhere else lol

Psalm42 · 09-13-2016, 07:41 PM

I just realized I put this in the wrong forum. Would a mod kindly move it over to the Ground Up Builds of the forum? Pretty please.. lol

Jsweezy · 09-13-2016, 09:17 PM

So was it a crazy good deal or were you just looking for a project? Well more of a project than these vans already are.

Psalm42 · 09-14-2016, 05:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jsweezy

So was it a crazy good deal or were you just looking for a project? Well more of a project than these vans already are.

Crazy good deal.I bought it for 500 then sold some rusty equipment that was left inside it for 500 lol