Floor mat moving about
Gidday Folks
Anyone else have a problem with their D/S floor mat wandering?
Every now and then, mine would catch on my clutch pedal, annoying me considerably.
Now that I've fixed it once and for all, I realise that the floor mat has always caught on the clutch pedal support lever, just not particularly noticeably! Having fixed the problem, Roo2 is much smoother when using the clutch. Amazing what one gets used to/accepts!
Got the idea from SWMBO's SH, which comes standard with a restraining T bar that bolts onto the cross member under the front of the driver's seat. Quite some time ago, I felt around the carpet covering this area in Roo2 and discovered that it has a bolt in the same place, just no floor mat restraining bracket.
Got out the Olfa knife this morning and cut a flap in the carpet so that I could get at the 10 mm bolt. It's in the centre, and is around 25 mm long. It secures one earth wire ... I don't know what that earth wire is earthing, but make certain that you put it back when you finish off :iconwink: :lol:!
Here is a photo of that area, with the newly made T bar fitted in Roo2:
The whole exercise took me about 1.5-2 hours. While simple enough, I reckoned it paid to get all the measurements right and the aluminium bar bent in all the right places before finally riveting the T bar permanently at the join.
So it was a matter of measuring the approximate length of the leg of the T first. It looked to me that it should be about 125 mm long, so I cut a piece of 15 x 2.5 mm aluminium bar to around 140 mm to give myself working space. It's much easier to cut a bit off than it is to "cut a bit on" ...
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As it turned out, about 140 mm long was exactly the right length, once bent to conform to the shape of the front of the cross member and floor.
Next came measuring up for the two holes in the mat. The mat came with a crappy hook thing when I bought the car. It attached through the car carpet on the corner of the mat nearest the door. In an attempt to stabilise it then, I put in another similar thing on the other side of the mat. Didn't work very well ...
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The cross bar needs to be around 410 mm long to span the back of the mat. I cut a piece of 15 x 2.5 mm bar to this length. Holding this in place, I aligned the mat with the car floor, then the bar with the holes in the mat. It would help if one had three or even four hands for this ... :rotfl:.
Having done this, I then marked the position of the holes in the mat relative to the bar, and the approximate position of the top of the T to the bolted down leg of the T. I marked each side of the intersection with a dot.
Then came the retaining bolts. I had decided on drilling and tapping some holes in the cross bar, then putting some 25 x 6 mm (approx. 1" x 3/16") round head bolts through these from the underside.
I found the right size tap and drill, then made a test hole in a piece of scrap from the same aluminium bar. Tapping aluminium properly is not easy, specially not with the cheap, crappy tap and die set/s I have (metric and imperial). They work, but compared with my excellent small taps I have for computer work, they really are crappy. They make a pretty loose thread in aluminium, but it is good enough to hold forever ...
At this point, I decided that the ends were too far above the floor level, so the cross bar was marked twice at each end where there would need to be two bends and back into the engineer's vice for the four bends.
Putting the cross bar back in place, I checked that I could still put the mat over the bolts, and then accurately marked where the leg of the T should be fixed.
Took it all out (yet again), and put one rivet through the leg and the cross bar. Put it all back in again. Jiggled everything to get it as square as possible. then marked each side of the leg of the T on the cross bar with a line.
Took it all out again, then drilled and inserted the final two rivets into the leg to cross bar join. Again, I put these in from the underside so that they should not wear the car carpet.
The assembly fitted without the floor mat (you can just see the bends at the far end):
Showing retaining mat bolts and rivets joining the leg and the cross bar:
With floor mat in place (I will replace the square nuts with wing nuts shortly):
Showing the position of the floor mat at the pedal end:
Hope that this is of some benefit to others who are similarly annoyed by this.
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