Mark:

You have two choices: you can butt weld all the way round as the sheetmetal will be good within an inch of the bottom in nearly all places, or you can get an offset tool (if you don't have one) and drill holes in the flange and spot weld it in.

Best thing to do is strip the interior, lay pan in, scribe around, and then trim to fit, with or without a flange. Much easier with a complete pan that bits. You can bolt the replacement to the suspension locater and parking brake brackets to locate it while working, very nice.

Really depends on your welding skills. If you can rapidly butt weld sheetmetal (an art I've not mastered yet!) you can stitch weld it in much faster than spotting the flange.

If you always end up with serious warpage and globby welds (my stage at the moment), flange and spot it as it won't move so much. You can grind flat and heavily undercoat (you want to do that anyway, with a latex/self vulcanizing undercoat) and that way keep the floors flatter.

Hopefully, it won't take you as long as it did us -- a year on the floors alone, working when we could. It would have been much faster and cheaper to simply buy a floor pan.

I'm deciding what to do with the 220D -- if I keep it, I will need floorpans-- the front is out on both sides, and the rear isn't much better.

Peter

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1972 220D ?? miles
1988 300E 200,012
1987 300D Turbo killed 9/25/07, 275,000 miles
1985 Volvo 740 GLE Turobodiesel 218,000
1972 280 SE 4.5 165, 000 - It runs!