Good morning. Looking for any links or tips on replacing the footwells on my ‘71 S2:FHC. Curious if they are spot or seam welded?
First approach I can think of is:
cut from underneath maybe on three of the sides and
pull the outboard side down to cut the inboard from inside
Then clean it up so new footwell can be dropped in from the top
filet welded from underneath. Maybe weld inboard edge from inside and skip weld the flange on the inside every 6-8 inches.
I will chime in to say that I replaced mine on a 63 FHC. I have no idea if they were the same by the time your car was built but I would be willing to bet they are spot welded. There are very few seam welds on an Etype shell. Now to accurately reproduce a spot weld, you would need a rather large set of spot welding tongs but you can do a credible fake out job by drilling holes in the upper flange and plug welding them.
Here are few details how I did mine. Spoiler alert. I cheated and used modern structural adhesives.
Drill from the top (not All the way through the floorpan of course) and plug weld back in from the top. You don’t want to be doing overhead plug welds if avoidable!