How to address this rust under the passenger's side?

[toro]

Just joined the Bronco fam with this 1972 sport. The exterior/interior looks to be in pretty good condition, but there is some rust underneath. It looks especially bad under the passenger's side.

It's hard to tell how much it goes through the pan because the previous owner rhino-lined the interior floor.

Would love some help gauging the overall condition of the underside and any advice y'all can give on how to approach fixing any rust that looks critical/more than superficial.

 

[thegreatjustino]

Start scraping off the bedliner and replace the floor pans the right way.

No realistic way of doing them from underneath.

Sadly, all kinds of shady sellers use bedliner to cover up larger issues. It looks to me that someone stuck a patch panel over the rusted out floors with panel adhesive then did the bedliner over the top of that. Nothing like cutting corners instead of fixing something the correct way. Considering the overspray in that engine compartment, you should be going over every inch of that Bronco with a fine tooth comb to find all the cut corners and other issues that are undoubtedly lurking.

 

[Madgyver]

No need to scrape off the bedliner.
Just cut the floor out and replace. Add new bedliner on new floor. Or paint.

 

[Rangerbj]

Buy a wire feed welder and angle grinder with cutting, grinding, and flap wheels and start cutting and welding. The only way.

 

[thegreatjustino]

No need to scrape off the bedliner.
Just cut the floor out and replace. Add new bedliner on new floor. Or paint.

You have to scrape off the bedliner in order to have metal to weld the new pans to and to find the spot welds that need to be cut in order to remove the rusty floor pan from the channel.

 

[DirtDonk]

Hey toro, great looking Bronco! Welcome to classicbroncos. Oh, and to all the issues with classic broncos too!
As they said, the visible rust is rusted through. These are mostly just one single panel thick, so wherever you see separation or a hole, it's all the way through that panel. And yours are the classic locations it looks like too:
1. Front floor pans
2. Inner kick panels
3. Under-hood rear corners (basically the front edge of the kick panels)

And likely other spots as well. Including the cowl area which is a PITA and not a great place to find extensive rust. If it's just a little, you're good. But if it's rusted through anywhere, it should be taken care of as that's a truly structural area of the body tub.

Agree to look closely under the hood. The fact that it runs good is a great sign, but as with seemingly all used Broncos, the wiring appears to have been "customized" or in other words, hacked and hewed and chopped and spliced.
Well worth some time to look for loose connections, frayed ends, and whatnot. Especially the whatnot!

Your dual exhaust is likely to cause you some issues at some point. Maybe not serious, but any exhaust down the driver's side is naturally going to be close to the wiring, the fuel lines and the brake tubes at some point. If you find that the exhaust tubing gets close to these things, try to add heat shielding where you can.
Many of us have gone back to either single exhaust (can still be high performance) or at least duals on the passenger side only. Just to get away from this problem and give us more room to work on the other systems.
Not mandatory, but helpful.

Good luck. keep the pics coming and if we see anything, we'll say something.

Paul

 

[Madgyver]

You have to scrape off the bedliner in order to have metal to weld the new pans to and to find the spot welds that need to be cut in order to remove the rusty floor pan from the channel.

Cut around the floor braces. no need to scrape everything off the piece that are being cut out. chop it out and work with the existing metal that you will need to weld to.
work smart, not hard...

 

[gr8scott]

I can't speak to your rust issues, but you should run a fan shroud. Without it the fan can't pull air through the radiator.