Door A Explodah

I dunno why, I glanced at the hinge area of the door. There was some flaky loose bubbly paint there… Gee. Picked at it with my finger and the paint came away pretty easily – in big chunks? Got a screwdriver and scratched it a bit… and it went through the metal. Made a sort of sickly scrunch sound. Like putting a screwdriver into some gravel? Awww… I’ll take the door off and have a look?

Door off, onto sawhorses in the driveway. Scratch a bit more with screwdriver… oh man. I’m going to be sick. Paper bag time. Breathe… gee. I’m going to need a new door. Wondering if I can find a matching color I find some used for $100-$150 but then the shipping is $250+. $400 for a new door? Hmm. For $400, at my beginner welder hourly rate of $0.25/hour, that’s 1600 hours of welding. I could probably build a whole new truck out of mig blobs in 1600 hours. I put the door back in the truck. I gotta think about this…

Next day I have another look. Gee. This doesn’t look SO bad. Its just metal. I can grind the bad stuff away and replace. Pretty clear though that the POR-15 from previous owner did nothing but hide the problem for a few years… can’t hide from the screwdriver of truth though…

I take the door back off, get out the grinder. And the mask. And the face shield. Pretty much complete welding attire to protect from the brown cloud that’s about the envelope the area.

Most of the outer skin is just gone after grinding. Some of the second layer is gone too. But there’s a ton of good metal around. This is no big deal? I’m generous with the grinder to get to nice thick metal. I am a bit concerned that what I rebuild needs to fit like the old door. The area I need to be most careful about is where the rubber seal hangs on the door. Need to follow the original lines. Otherwise the door won’t door.

Tin snips and jigsaw, I cut out metal, hammer and bend, freehand repair pieces, then glue them into place with my mig.

Having nobody to show me how this is done I get to experiment with a bunch of different techniques. The metal is nice and thick and the rust is gone I have no trouble with burn through. Lovely to have a big chunk of metal as a heat sink. The inner layer is soon filled. The other trick is lots of small blobs of metal. Zap-zap-zap. Pointillist style. Like Seurat? Gotta be careful though because its easy to have holes between the points. So sometimes after I’ve got the surface where I want it I’ll draw a bead across, melt it all a bit, then grind it back with grinder.

After I’m satisfied with inner layer I spray it all with zinc primer, then start on the outer layer. I’ve got 16g metal so that’s what I use. Even though the door is thick metal, the 16g is much thicker. I cut pieces to rougly the right shape, then grind down until they fit like my eye says they should. Weld one edge into place, then hammer the piece until another edge is in place. Eventually the piece is welded flush. Pretty neat!

End of the day I hose it all down with zinc primer. Tomorrow I’ll be done!

This was a pretty interesting process, build up with mig, then grind down. In one section I had too many pin holes, I needed more heat. So finally I cranked slowly across the whole area real slow, drew a huge fat bead. That did the trick.

What this process taught me is that no matter what, I can just grind all this muck away in the future and do it again. If there’s corrosion, if it starts to come apart, etc, if it looks at me funny… I can grind it away and do it again. I’m empowered!

Last little bit went real slow. I used a bright light to see any pits or holes, fill them with weld blob, then grind down. Weld it all, grind it all, find more pits, repeat. But finally it was good enough. Hosed it all down with vht suspension paint:

This maybe took me 10 hours of work? I reinstalled the door. It is lovely to see, smooth to the touch. The black paint isn’t really notable.

Most frustrating thing though… this is the best most complex work I’ve done and its pretty much invisible to anyone. I gotta open the door and point them into the hinge area and even then it isn’t really clear how much new metal is there.

Anyway. Now the driver’s door is looking at me funny. Looks like a lesser version of the same issue. Wonder how much easier it will go with my new skillz?

Bubbling Paint on the A Pillar (and other assorted rust bubbles)

For a while I’ve been casting sidelong glances at the top of my a pillar. Paint there is sort of bubbling. A bit.

Try not to think about it because its so horrible. What if whole a-pillar is just a giant bar of rust? Is that a fatal problem?

Today I got out the step ladder and went at that rust bubble with a screwdriver.

I didn’t take a picture before I started but it was just blue paint that had bubbled a bit. But it was also a bit soft to the fingers. So it was paint over something that wasn’t solid.

I scratched the paint off with a flathead screwdriver, then kept scratching at all the softness, the bubbling brown rust, until I’d explored the limits of the badness.

Unfortunately the rust extended to under the windshield seal, which means I can’t fix it with the mig unless I remove the windshield.

Here is right after I started to scratch:

After I’d scratched and ground it clean, then painted with ZeroRust.

I drove the car to my local awsome glass shop. They said… um… this isn’t exactly a… ‘rotisserie restoration’… the windshield will probably break if we remove it… prolly you should put in a temp fix and do the welding when the windshield needs replacement.

Just as I got home my wife got home from her moms, she handed me a half used pack of JBWeld Steel Stick. Age Unknown…

So I tore off a chunk, worked it for a minute and then jammed it in the rust hole, pressed it way up into the hole using a screwdriver. Kept pushing until it was jammed hard with whatever epoxy that is. My goal was to press out any voids.

When I was done it looked like an old hornets nest.

Then nearby were some other small bubbles in the paint… sure enough these were hidden rust holes. I gave it the same treatment except I could grind all the metal clean with my angle grinder, cleaned the underneath as well as I could, then hosed it down with some coats of zinc paint. And then I repeated that work on 2 other rust holes.

After a few hours the zinc was dry enough to weld. Because there was no seal nearby I filled the holes with zaps from the mig welder. Then grind the welds down. Pretty nice.

The main thing is to give it two small zaps, then wait until the metal is warm to the touch. Generally a minute between zaps. This keeps the heat way down, avoids warping the metal or catching the car on fyre.

Just starting to weld up a larger hole. Lots of time to take pictures while waiting for the metal to cool…

Right before I close up the welds with the final blobs I give the hole a generous blast of zinc paint. Maybe help to seal up the backside of the new metal.

Finally grind the welds down most of the way, then paint with VHT Epoxy Suspension Paint. To cover the welds I used 4 very light coats with 10 minutes between. The jbweld was thirsty though, it took 3 heavy coats, just kept sucking up the paint, which I think is fine.

Started raining last night.

I am wondering how to help reseal that windshield rubber until that distant day when the windshield comes out. Supposed to use urethane glue to hold rubber onto the metal and glass…

Tail Repair, Tailgate

Leaning into the back of the truck I put some pressure on the tailgate and noticed it creaking. Bounced it a bit with my weight and the entire bottom seam was flexing. The entire bottom seam was rusted out.

That cannot stand!

First I ground away all the bad metal. And the sealant. And then it was really true that there was no bottom seam at all.

I welded in a bunch of tiny scrap pieces. Went well, took a few hours.

Then noticed nasty stuff on the outside. Oh well, might as well fix it.

Finally back on the truck with mismatched paint:

Whhaaaa! A Hefty Pair of those Nasty Rocker Panel Ends

Can’t fit THAT on the album cover.

I was going to ignore the rocker perforation but wife had an opinion this once… “Well… You can’t leave it like that.”

Uh… honey? I’m tired? I feel like I’m getting done with this welding stuff. This manual labor is starting to make me hurt.

Ok, well we’ll see I guess.

I started on the passenger side at about 2pm after welding all morning. And somehow everything went right. Got it done in about 2.5 hours. Pretty fast I think.

Yeah, in hindsite this does look aweful. But no water into the cabin. How bad can that be?

Ground away all the bad metal and realized there was enough good metal that I could do this bottom part with a single piece. I went with the tried and true “weld some of it in, then hammer and grind it to fit” technique. And that worked great just this once.

I was pretty happy with how quickly that came together. So the next day I plan to zap the driver’s side, which has slightly worse rust:

Well it turned out there were some significant differences. Enough metal had gone by-by that I had to make multiple complex pieces. And that took a lot of time. The upper bit went well but it was a u-shaped piece that needed to curve in 2 dimensions. I fit the piece and then cut darts out of it so it could bend. This took 3 hours.

Then ground away the bad metal in the rocker. The backside and inside of the rocker are rusted and need to be cut away and replaced with new metal.

Here I had to make a pretty complex piece with a cereal box.

I mean look at that thing… and then folded, welded, folded again, welded more. Complicated. And this is just the end of the rocker tube.

Trace the piece on the sheet, then cut it out with jigsaw. Thank goodness I have that bosch jigsaw, best tool ever. Cuts like a damn laser.

Was tough going to weld that piece in. Not a lot of room for the torch. Welded the seam on the outside, then welded it on the inside.

Then I zapped the inside of the rocker as much as possible with zinc paint.

Then fold the panel shut and weld that seam. See what a complex shape that is! I’m impressed.

Then make the outer wheelwell lining.

Weld into place with darts, then hammer the tabs over and weld the seams.

Then grinding:

Yes, insanely strong.

This one side ended up taking all day.

 

A Yucky Little Hole Is Fixed

One of the land cruiser logo stud holes had rusted through an perforated all around. About a 2.5×2.5″ section.

This went really easy.

Im getting lots better about controlling the heat. Pretty much only do short tacks now. Let the weld cool before I put down another one.

I even checked from the back in bright sun and no pinholes. I chalk this up to my using more heat and hitting the metal in shorter bursts. Got better penetration, no pinholes. Awesome!

Lots More Welder-ing On That Truck

Have been really busy fixing rust.

First was the passenger side rear quarter panel. Its just that little bit of rust above the mud flap?

Well, I cut in a bit large in case I found anything interesting.

Yeah… that’s not good. I need to see better, get better access…

That is the wire that tells the car that the rear passenger door is open. It goes through a big giant piece of something yummy. Some rust stuff? Filler? JBWeld? I have no idea. I pryed it loose with a screwdriver and found the underside was in really great shape! But the wire was solidly embedded into it. I cut the wire and spliced in a new one.

Then got to work grinding away and replacing bad metal.

This job went much easier than the driver’s side because the quarter panel still had its base and back side. It was good to cut away a big area for access and I was able to weld the piece back in when I was done.

Again the 16g sheet makes for some really strong wheel well arches. I left the bad metal in place to use as a form, cut it away once it was time to weld in its replacement.

The final piece of wheel arch here was sort of tricky. Had to do some Vice Origami(tm). Was surprisingly difficult to get a piece curved in 2 directions and with funny angled sides. And I screwed it up a little.

See once its welded in there is a triangle gap. Darn!

That is the last time I’m freehanding a complex metal piece. Cereal box template from now on!

So I fill that triangle with a piece I had laying around:

Once its all snug and welded in place I grind the extra away. Simple!

That double-curved boxed section is incredibly solid. Like wow.

Then weld in a new piece and get to grinding.

And finally… I hit it with filler. Ouch!

Nope, this isn’t a pro job, that’s for sure.

But it is strong!

 

 

Finally a welded patch done mostly well

I talked to the maker of my MIG, they pointed me to a place in north Carolina that sells parts for it. Got a new wire sleeve and a new nozzle for $17. Sweet!

That’s good news. The better news is that the old nozzle was about 1cm too short, so wasn’t getting good gas coverage of the weld. AND the wire sleeve was sticking, it was just a plastic straw, this new one has a coiled wire housing, much stiffer and should work better.

And the best news is that both these things have massively improved my ability to weld. Live and learn.

So today I took issue with the second patch that I’d made:

Since it wasn’t raining or snowing I made a move on it. Ground it away and found the rust soup I expected. So I got out the ‘ol grinder and cut out all the old metal. And then cut it in a nice rectangle so it’d be easy to make a piece.

Then I cut out a conservatively larger piece of 16g and then sat by the hole and ground it down until it fit.

Here I screwed up. Believe it or not the metal you add with the mig wants to go in the groove between the metal. So when I mig’d this tight fiting piece along the bottom it pressed up against the top and so then it dint’ fit any mores.

You can see now that there’s a diagonal bend in the panel from the patch to the upper right… Meh.

Something else I noticed, this was good metal to good metal and the tack welds were so solid. And it was really easy to fill the whole thing. When I was done with grinding there was just a single hole to redo. Much better than welding to bad/thin metal where attempting to fix a hole means blowthrough and more hole.

Here is after the first grind. The gap is mostly solid metal. Success.

Welded the holes and ground again. Solid!

Then hit it all with primer and it started to rain.

Wish the weather was better. Anyway. Planning to paint it soon… Gotta wait for a warm day I think. Right now its raining and sleeting.

 

 

Redeeming A Previous Welding Crime

Got sick of looking at this horrific patch I applied when I first started welding on the truck. I literally cut out a square of 24g and slapped it over a rust hole, then welded the edges. It just never stopped looking grotty. And after a month I figured it warn’t going to get better on its own…

Square patch in the upper right… its gotta go!

So… I got out the grinder and took out the welds. And found a soup of rust and misery just hiding back there to terrify me.

I don’t know what I expected to happen. I guess this was just a total lack of clear thinking. The black stuff is dynamat.

So then its clear that problem is worse than I thought, that I need to just disappear a bunch of bad metal.

Put on the cutting disk and take it away.

The thing is, there’s no point being precious about a little rust hole. Its just a huge waste of time to try and save it. Cut it all away and put in good metal. Much much easier and will be durable.

The trick is to get the new piece to fit nicely. Here I made a boo-boo and didn’t trace a nice square rectangle, I got sloppy with the angle grinder and cut out a trapezoid. So then I put on a grinding disc and made it back into a rectangle, or at least something with straight edges.

Then I cut out some 16g with the jig saw and ground it and the hole until they agreed about the shape.

Then magnets to hold the piece into place.

Interesting thing, tack the bottom edge where its flush. Then hammer the rest of the edges until they’re flush too. Just slowly coerce the thing to be flush. Once a point is flush then tack it.

This doesn’t look great but its fine. I tack the bottom edge where its flush, then the top edge can be pushed into place. No big deal.

Once the first tacks are done the magnets go away, just tack around the new metal.

Then I grind the tacks smooth, and finally I weld the seam, a butt weld. Weld about an inch at a time and let it cool. Once I’ve got a whole lap done I grind it all down.

Because I’m a terrible welder there are 10 places with holes in my welds. I weld these holes up, then grind them down to find one more hole.

Unfortunately its now snowing hard so I need to stop. I hit it all with metal etch primer and put everything away until later.

Because I used 16g the new metal is really damn strong. Looks good inside and out. Next sunny day I’ll grind the welds down smooth and paint again. This is much better and more permanent than the old patch technique. And now I’m not afraid of cutting metal away. I’m glad this was a nice flat section.

Cheers!

This idiot bought a welder and is welding on his truck

Actually my friend bought a welder, a really nice new one. Much more welder than any beginner has any right to own, at least in my opinion.

So first realize that I have a blue land cruiser with serious rot all around the rear quarter panel. Yes theres more rust but the quarter panel literally fell off when I pounded on it. All that sodden bondo came out in a big hunk in my driveway. Yuck!

And there’s a big foot long hole at the bottom of the rear quarter panel, right over the exhaust pipe. Is really loud to drive and stinky too.

A

Can see that the wheelwell needs attention too, and all that cruft in there, its all gotta get redone properly.

Some random rusty spots.

More rust

I think this part is my favorite, its hidden behind the bumper end and flows up into the bondo at the rear brakelight.

So now I need to fix the truck. And I don’t know how to weld. Certainly can’t afford to pay someone to do it, everyone around here thinks they’re working on a Bentley, needs to do it perfectly.

I play around with a sheet of 24 gauge that I got at home depot. I get some I’m pretty good at it with my friends welder. I’m not burning through or nothing. Most impressive, once a bead has been laid you can totally hammer the crap out of it and it won’t come loose, the weld is stronger and nearly as ductile as the original sheet. A weld is a damn good fix.

But… this friend let me use his welder on weekends. Let me use it in his driveway for about 90 minutes per week, so long as he wasn’t hung over or napping or it was raining.

So long story short my time on task was too low. Was eating away at me, driving me crazy.

So I did what any reasonable person would do in the same situation, I went on craigslist and bought the cheapest mig I could get.

Its an Astro Power 110, a 110v mig welder. Came with a tank of 75/25 and 0.023 wire.

Astrowelder PowerMig 110!

The only things I don’t like about it:

• it only has 4 power levels, and the lowest is still high high to comfortably weld 24g.
• the damn wire sticks in the gun unless I hold the gun just right.
• wire sticks if I turn the feed down too far.

The first thing I did was try and do a minor patch job on the outside of the quarter panel, and around the back of the quarter panel, near the spare tire. But after 6 hours of goofing around I realize I can’t get access to all the rust from the outside, that I’m going to need to cut away some good metal to get access to the wheel well. And everything I’d done so far was a solid waste of time.

Start cutting until I have a straight edge and good metal.

S

My half-assed patches after I ground away the rust.

Out comes the cutter and away goes the original work.

And then I go to home depot and buy some 16g sheet. Much thicker, can’t really cut big pieces with clips, but I can cut out shapes with a jigsaw.

I feel so good after cutting that panel that I start grinding away all the rust on the inner wheelwell. This lets me access the wheelwell steel, so I can fix that first, then I can put a body panel down on the outside.

I cut out a strip of 16g, weld it into the wheelwell, then cut slots into it with grinder and bend the tabs over, then weld the tabs together.

Strip welded into wheelwell.

Welded into wheelwell on inside and outside. Here’s a shot of the wheelwell itself.

And a shot of one of the tabs getting bent and pounded into shape. Once a weld happens it is all “Hammer Friendly(tm)”

After “fixing” wheelwell I cut out panels to go from body to edge of wheelwell. Thing is, the inside of wheelwell is inside the car. And the outside of body panel is outside the car… so its important that there’s no holes anywhere. Yeah could fill with bondo but I’ve got a welder!

I put a flashlight inside the car and fill every light hole. Not pretty but its FINE.

With new found confidence (and seriously impressed with how solid the 16g is, I proceed to cut away the hacky old work, replace with solid 16g panels to solid truck steel.

One place I impressed myself… The inside of rear quarter panel is corrugated. So you can’t butt-weld sheet to corrugated unless you match the corrigations. Which is impossible.

So I cut a thin strip and turned it 90 degrees, and welded along the corrugations. Corrugations wiggle along the strip from the top, then I can simply butt some sheet to the bottom of it. Its a welded corrugation adapter. I thought of that approach myself. Should i patent it?

With bumper end removed I cut away the rest of the corner.

I tried to remove the bumper, with breaker bar I managed to break every bolt. Yay!

Lots cut away and replaced now, rear bumper pad removed. Im happy with how this is coming together. Yeah it might look horrible to most but I’m happy it will be waterproof and solid!

I’ve now learned a lot of lessons. All of them are hard ones.

• Don’t ever weld to bad metal. Cut the bad metal away. If its a tricky complicated section… oh well… cut it away and rebuild it. The alternative is that you’ll have to cut it away later and that means redoing everything you did on top of it. So save time and cut it away before hand.
• Corners are really hard!
• Once you get a properly sized piece into place you can hammer on the new piece to make it into a corner. Then clamp into place and weld it all around!

 

Rear corner. See the meeting curves? It gets worse. But also note that shiny metal is about as thin as tinfoil… Its just there as a guide.

Yeah!!! Yuck.

The clamp it down and weld it technique.

Voila! A masterpiece!

I tried so hard to get this piece done before the rains. But now its raining…

When it came time to install the final piece I lost a race with the dark. I tacked it roughly into place and cleaned up. Rains are coming for the next few days. I’ll trim the bottom and wheelwell edges of the panel after its installed. The panel needs to bend in a pretty complicated way and that 16g doesn’t like to bend, so figure it’ll be easiest this way.

Some stuff I’ve been doing:

hit everything with self etching primer at the end of every day. This prevents the rust. Its pretty easy to grind away for next day.

Two days later there’s a few hours of sun, I grind the last big piece into shape and tack/weld it into place.

Something I’m realizing: you can’t just put a bunch of spot welds next to each other over and over. At least when I do that I end up with a similar number of tiny pin holes between each spot weld. Then I guess I’m to spot weld each pin?

So my plan now is to grind the seam flat, then lay a continuous bead along the seam.

 

Fluidfilm AR

I’ve used Fluidfilm NAS on a bunch of stuff in the past year. Mostly it does what is claimed, sprays on easily with the supplied “professional” gun, it stays wet but sticks and protects metal from corrosion. Areas that don’t get access to dirt like the inside of the pillars stay oily feeling. Areas under the truck get a coating of dust so it feels dry but if you scratch it with your fingernail you can tell there’s gunk under there protecting the metal.

Fluidfilm AR on spare tire holder. Stuff is pretty solid, like frozen snot.

One area that isn’t getting protection though is the wheel wells and the center rear of the underside. I sprayed it on quite heavy but after a few drives in the rain there is nothing left. I’m mostly concerned with the seams there around the edge so looking for something thicker.

Enter Fluidfilm AR. The fluidfilm website says NAS is recommended for undercoating, the AR is… not. Maybe too difficult to apply? The site is strangely silent on AR and so is the internet. I bought a gallon to see how it would do, so can share.

First note that AR is much, much thicker than NAS. At room temperature NAS is like Yoplait yoghurt, you can scoop some out with a spoon and if you hold the spoon upside down it will glop off. The NAS will spray fine thought the fluidfilm gun. The AR is like frozen ice cream. You can take a scoop of it but it takes some work to force the spoon in. Hold a heaping spoonful upside down and the AR won’t glop off.

I found a video on the internet, in german, about how to apply AR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egK4XyDPpdc

The guy heats it up in a crock pot, then sprays it. Seems doable.

My first attempt to apply it I put the bucket of AR into a big pot of water on the stove, I figured a double boiler would do the trick. I had it on the stove, water boiling, for most of the day, it became soft but the fluidfilm didn’t become liquid. Using a funnel I did manage to pour some into the 1 quart spray bottles but the stuff is too thick and clogged the cold gun. I used a stick to clean it out and was able to get the 200F stuff to feed into the spray gun, but clearly it was too thick and was firing large drops, making a mess.

I tried putting the bottle into the microwave but I guess its transparent to microwaves because it didn’t heat up. Bummer. I live at sea level so failure of double boiler means Fluidfilm AR is not sufficiently liquid at 212F (100C).

Next attempt I put a scoop into a coffee mug and left it in the oven at 250F. After 3 hours it was slightly sizzling, I removed with an oven mit and it was a very light liquid, fully flowing, like turkey grease. I went down to the garage and painted it onto some hardware using a 1″ bristle brush. Initially the liquid was so thin that it ran off the bristles, dripped off whatever I painted it on. After 15 minutes it was becoming significantly thicker, like syrup, I poured it back into the bucket.

After the area I painted was all cooled down the AR makes a wonderful thick coating, much thicker than NAS. I think perfect for the spare tire holder and mechanism. Only thing with this stuff is that its very thick when cold so not good for inside doors or anywhere else that needs to drain. A glop of this would plug up a drain hole. I bet I could clog a toilet with it. So… just for surface use, M-Kay?

Conclusion:Fluidfilm AR requires a temp of above 240F to be easily sprayable.

I put my quart nylon spray bottle full of fluidfilm AR into the oven at 250F, left it for 2 hours. It became fully liquid. Given the larger quantity I was able to spray all four wheelwells and the underside before it cooled. Used about 1/2 a bottle for that. Need to be careful because that stuff is hot! Wear gloves, wear a mask.

Driving on the freeway in the last 2 weeks of heavy seattle rain (40F-50F) the stuff hasn’t budged. If you wipe your finger in the wheelwells you’ll get back a fingertip of cold greasy gunk. Note I said finger not fingernail, its caked on there. Looks like it is holding up very well all the way around.

Given how thick it was at 100C I suspect it will laugh at hot summer rain. I’ll see I guess.