Water Problem

Hi all,

Problem on my '91 TC; whenever it rains, water seems to be collecting in the rear floor, in between the frame and the interior carpet. Seems like the water is going to the lowest point.

When you touch the floor carpet, it's like when you touch a waterbed, you can feel it jostling around inside; in other words, its trapped, and not penetrating the carpet (i cant mop it up with towels).

I heard somewhere that there are drains that can clog. Could this be causing the problem? How can I fix it?

-- its trapped, and not penetrating the carpet (i cant mop it up with towels).


You need to find out how it's getting in there. I see in your profile you're on the east coast where there's plenty of bad weather and salted roads.

I'm guessing there's some holes in the bottom side of your body / floorboards / side mouldings or whereever you get 'em over there.

There's some (rubberized) coated sound padding between the carpet and floor pans that are supposed to keep road noise to a minimum. Since you cant feel the wet, the water's trapped between the floor pans and the sound padding, maybe one of the drain plugs fell off of the mounting hole rusted too large for the drain plug to fit anymore. The plug should be at the lowest point as you mentioned in your post.

There are (in most cars) some plastic or rubber (removable) drain plugs under the sound pad to help in these emergencies but you'll have to pull the carpet up to find them. Also, it makes sense to pull it up anyway so you can let it dry out thouroughly before making repairs and replacing the carpets.

If you don't dry it out, you'll be very sorry later when it mildews and stinks to high heaven.

You can do a visual inspection from under the car to check on the floor pan integrity, also poke around the floor pans to see if there are any weak spots.