Zac’s Guide For To Making A Solid Boot Floor

[Entice]

Zac's Guide for to Making a Solid Boot Floor

R32 (Generally Applies to Any Car)

In this guide I aim to show you, step by step, how to make a solid floor for the boot of your R32, or any car really. By the end of reading this I hope you will be inspired to do this for yourself. Please comment and ask questions. Also, post up some pictures of yours if you follow this guide.

Materials / Tools

- 1500x1200x12mm MDF

- Stanley Knife or similar

- Jigsaw

- Masking Tape

- Pencil / Eraser / Permanent Marker

- Long and Short Ruler

- Liquid Nails, Zero Nails or similar

- Small scraps of wood

- About 9 Screws (Roughly 2.5cm Tall)

The first thing you need to do is decide what you will be doing about your spare wheel. That is, will you keep it or ditch it? It is quite common to remove it as to lower the overall weight of your car. The stock Japanese wheel weighs 14kg so it is up to you.

If you decide you don't want to keep your wheel you can skip steps 4 to 6 and cut it down the middle then follow from step 7 onwards. However, I recommend you follow the whole guide in case you decide you want to take the spare with you on a long journey; even if you don't plan on having it in daily.

Okay, let's get to it!

Step 1

Empty your boot. Take everything out including the carpet, the piece of thin wood covering the wheel and finally the wheel itself.

Take the boot carpet, turn it upside down and lay it flat on your sheet of MDF. You will most likely notice that the side the bottom side is not even; there will be two raised sections on the padding.

Take your Stanley knife and slash away at it while gently lifting the raised sections off. They come off nice and easy until you have a even surface.

Step 2

Now we are going to trace the outline of the carpet onto the MDF. To prepare for this you want to make sure carpet is not going to move. I did this by putting 3 heavy tins of paint on in each of the corners.

Next grab a pencil and use the following technique to trace all the way around the carpet. Put your hand on the edge of the carpet and lightly draw lines about as long as your hand. Try to keep your pencil at a 90° angle and go over each section 3 times before sliding your hand along. When you get to corners just go straight off the edge, don't try and turn the corner with the pencil.

When you're done take the carpet off and put it somewhere safe and clean. Grab your permanent marker and go over your pencil lines; follow the middle of the three lines. Feel free to create your own line if it looks better or straighter. Use a ruler if there are any straight sections such as the back.

You should have something that looks like this. Remember this in for an R32 boot.

Step 3

It's time to cut it out, for now we want it all in one piece. Grab your jigsaw and start cutting. Don't worry too much about cutting everything too accurately; your lines aren't accurate and we won't see it anyway. However, cut on the outside of the line, you can always take more off later but you can't add any.

Here's a tip: as you're cutting a long section off, if the MDF starts to dangle just place a small piece of wood in the cut as shown below and continue cutting. This saves needing someone to hold it and allows you to focus on cutting in a straight line.

Keep going till it is all cut out and looks something like this:

Step 4

Now it is time to get some measurements from your car. If you are doing this on a R32 then you may just use the measurements below and skip this step.

It may be obvious how I got these measurements but this is a guide after all. Go to your boot with your ruler, a pencil and a piece of paper. Draw a very rough picture of your boot and mark the above lines. Now, measure from the flat edges how far it is till the floor starts to dip where the wheel goes. Be generous and give yourself room to get the wheel in and out.

Step 5

Come back and mark out the lines on your cut out like below. Use a combination of rulers to make sure these lines are reasonably straight and accurate. Again, it isn't going to kill you if they aren't perfect. Throw the wheel on and make sure it fits, If it doesn't you've done something wrong; have another try; you only want to cut this out once.

I actually marked the two side lines first then joined them at a 90° where the left line went off the MDF; this makes it easier to cut the square out as you will see later.

Step 6

I decided to take the time to make sure everything was going alright. I put the carpet on the MDF to make sure it was cut to the right shape. I then wanted to check that my wheel square was marked in the right position so I grabbed some masking tape and marked where the lines were as below.

Take it out to the car and put it in, feel around the lines and with any luck they will be on or very close to the dips of the wheel hole. If they are, good job! Almost there!

Step 7

It's now time to get the jigsaw back out and cut it into sections. Cutting with the directions marked below will give you a nice clean finish; you can't turn 90° corners with a jigsaw. You will then have 3 pieces.

You actually need to make another cut here. It Is possible to continue the blue line all the way up and get the same affect. I wanted to try it with 3 pieces but you need a 4 piece floor to get it in the boot.

After cutting, clean it up a bit with some sand paper and take it out to trial fit in the boot.

Step 8

Next we need to secure the floor and make all 4 sections level. We're going to do this by adding feet for it to stand on. Luckily there are enough sections of the floor that are equal and free of bumps etc to mount these feet. Once they're attached we'll screw the floor onto them so it can be removed later.

Grab some scrap wood, you don't need much. Cut out 6 squares; it doesn't matter if they're the same length, but make sure they're the same height. Mine were 9.5mm high.

Trial fit the feet with double-sided tape or blue tack; remember you can roll normal tape over itself to make it double sides. Positions such as the below will be good, move them around with the floor in until they are correct.

We're going to be using liquid nails to hold these down. I used Bostik Zero Nails which is similar.

Once they are correct repeat the following process for each foot, see the pictures to see what I'm doing. Get a nail, pen or ruler and sit it against the foot you're working on. This will allow us to take it off, put some glue on it then put it back in the same position. Put a decent amount of glue on each foot, more is better than less; you can clean off excess when you push them down. Use your finger to spread it out on the foot; it's not super glue so don't worry.

Put it back in place and press down, grab your nail and remove the excess glue that came out the bottom. I recommend having a cloth present to wipe the nail and your finger on.

When they're all stuck down you're going to have to leave it for about 24 hours to make sure it is nice and dry.

Step 9

Now that your first set of feet are dry you can put the pieces back in without worry. For now I just did the front 3 as the back you have two options for securing that will be discussed in a moment.

Trial fit these 3 and add more feet if you find it necessary; I added one to the left side small piece as shown above. You can also use scrap bits of thinner MDF, such as 9mm, to lift bits up until it is as perfect as you want it. Just use normal wood glue to stick these on.

Now for the rear piece; as I said before you have two options: add more feet or modify the piece. This section of the boot is actually on an angle so putting feet there is a little awkward; though of course possible. I recommend you follow the next step instead.

[Entice]

Step 10

Skip this step and continue adding feet if you want to go that way.

Okay, take the last piece and trace it onto some more 12mm MDF; I had some left over since I had to get too much in the first place. We are going to modify it, however, by adding tabs to screw through the holes as shown below.

To know where to put the tabs you will just need to mark them really roughly while you have it in the boot. After the first cut just take it back to the boot and cut more off if need be until it fits.

Step 11

Skip this step if you decided you don't want the spare wheel.

Take the wheel cover out and cut or drill a circle in it that is big enough to get a finger in; this will help you lift it out and get it back in easier.

I also attached a scrap bit of MDF that will rest on the tyre, making it more resistant to sagging and overall more solid. You will need to be the judge on thickness here, just trial pieces underneath till it is level.

Step 12

It is now time to screw it all down if you are happy with how level it is. Follow this process for each section. Take some single sided tape and cut a bit off. Place it upside down on the feet. Then carefully put the piece of floor on the feet where it will be attached; try to lower it all at once in the correct position, you can always redo it if need be. When you take it out you will have marked where you need to drill.

Drill through the centre of the tape, take the tape off and put it back in the boot. This method is actually very easy and very accurate. Put the floor piece back in position and re-drill the holes again; we do this so the feet also have matching holes. Now grab your screws and secure it tight. Then move on to the next piece.

Note: The cow is a mini vacuum that I used to remove the dust and stuff caused by drilling holes.

Step 13

The last step is to remove the masking tape from your carpet, clean it if needed and put it back in the boot. Now, you're done!

I hope this guide helps you. Again, please comment and ask questions if

you need.

Edited October 5, 2008 by Entice

[Spraderz-33]

Good work man Will definitely come in handy

[-Dukes-]

I did this on my r33 about a couple of months ago,

I hot glue gunned my wood to dynamat,

It was going well till about 3 weeks ago when the dynamat peeled off, so now it sits a bit funny,

I shoulda bolted it to the boot, lol

[Kinks]

I hot glue gunned my wood to dynamat,

The girls at the emergency ward would have gotten a giggle out of that