Rust Repair And Restoration - Busted The Rust

While digging around the backside of the wheelhouse, we also discovered a section of the inner wheelhouse that had rotted away and led to a rust hole forming in the side of the bed.

To fix this, we cut that rusty section out as cleanly as possible and made a cardboard template to fit the opening.

We transferred the shape of the template to a flat piece of steel, tracing the line with a scribe. A Sharpie would work just as well, too. We then cut the shape out with a pair of shears.

OK, that was easy, but how do you get your flat piece of steel to fit the shape of the opening it needs to weld into? We used a section of welding filler rod, bending it to fit the contours the patch panel needs to follow. A section of coat hanger would work well, too. Use something that is easy to bend but holds its shape well.

We also needed to find something to use as a form to bend our patch panel around-something that was at least as wide as the patch so that when bent, the curve was uniform across the whole patch. We found that one of our 8mm sockets matched the curve perfectly.

To make the bend, we clamped the socket to our piece of steel with a pair of vise grips, then clamped the whole thing into our bench vise. We used a pair of flat-bladed panel-gripper vise grips to bend the steel evenly around the curve of the socket.

We checked our progress often against the wire template. Soon we had a spot-on replacement panel.

With the bed repair welded in place, we could now address the rotted section of the inner wheelhouse.

We did this in a similar though less exacting manner as the bed repair. We eyeballed a section of steel, tack-welding and trimming it to fit as we went along.

We purposely left extra metal sticking out from the repair area so we could hammer it over to form part of the missing section of our inner wheelhouse mounting flange. We stuck a big body spoon behind the flange, using it to hammer against.

We decided to reuse what was left of the old mounting flange that we took off with the chisel rather than making a new one. We cleaned up the flange, hammering it flat and grinding away the old primer and parts where the inner and outer panels were still stuck together. The problem with this was we hammered and heated the flange enough to change its shape. Notice how the curve of the flange no longer fits the arch of the wheelhouse?

We used a stretching technique to change the arc of the bend in the flange. When backed up with something as hard or harder than the metal you're working with, sheetmetal will stretch when you hit it with a hammer. You can really stretch it out when you use something sharp like a chisel. The metal under the point flattens and squishes outward. Do this along the edge of a piece of steel and it will start to curve. To stretch our flange, we hammered along the inside edge (the part facing down to the ground). You can see the sections where the metal is dimpled in the photo on the right. Doing this opened up the curve of the flange and we were able to match the shape of the wheelhouse. Remember, you have to hammer against something hard or this will not work. We used the flat section of our vise as an anvil.