Based on the extent of the rust around the area on the floor which the sills attach to and a lot of the perimeter sections I decided the best approach would be to replace the floor entirely (this will give me a chance to clean up most of the underside properly and restore it fully).

Starting to chop the floor out in sections:

Front half out:

Nearly there:

All that I could find of the offside middle sill:

And majority of the floor out, just the areas around the edges left to unpick from the walls (just to think 4 months ago I was driving this around as my only vehicle!):

Having assessed the cross floor supports it looks like I’ll need to do the following:

• 1st support – Already taken out, new one to fit.
• 2nd and 3rd I beam supports – In fairly good nick so I’ll repair the sections that need repairing.
• 4th tophat – Minor repairs.
• 5th and 6th tophat – Given that these are only welded to the chassis legs now and need some significant repair I think I’ll just replace both of them to save time.

I’ve had to reschedule the shot blasting for Thursday as I’m still waiting for my new priming gun to arrive and didn’t want to leave the chassis in bare metal.

So I spent today making a start on removing the nearside outer and inner sill, and front top-hat, outriggers and cross member.

The outer sill came off first:

to reveal a second outer sill underneath. Some lazy sod had just welded the new one straight over the rusty old one:

With the outer sill off it’s clear the middle sill also needs some work:

Stripping the paint above the spot welds for the inner and middle sill to drill them out also revealed a few holes:

Outrigger and jacking point cut out to make access to the sill easier:

And started chopping the inner sill out:

Hopefully I’ll get the rest of the inner sill off tomorrow, and carry on with the front top hat section.

After what seems like an eternity I finally have the camper on the jig and rolled over! With the pop-top removed I was able to rotate it one-handed with ease (there’s quite an impressive pile of rust under the left side of the jig in this picture; this fell out of the front deformation panel as I rolled it. It made a sound like a rain maker!)

Now to the actual task in hand of addressing the underside. This is how it currently looks. I don’t know a huge amount about the history of this van but it has had some repairs done under here in the past (certainly some of the jacking points/outriggers have had work done as the welding is a bit naff).

It probably looks worse in the above pictures as it’s got quite a hefty layer of underseal on, I’ve started scraping this off with a wallpaper scraper and paint thinners and it looks like at least on some of the chassis its done a good job of preserving the paintwork (the blue paint below is og).

My current plan is to scrape all this off to get a better idea of what needs attention, and then possibly get a mobile shot-blaster in to completely clean up the underside. I’m still not sure if I’ll get it blasted though.

I’ve had the last few days off work so have been down the workshop stripping the van down ready to get the rollover jig setup. As always everything seems to take twice as long as one would hope, with every other bolt rusted shut and needing a little persuasion to get them off (I gave up on the anti roll bar clips and ended up taking the grinder to them).

I now have the van stripped down to a shell (plus the front beam) and hope to get the jig on in the next week or two.