welding in rust repair wheel arch panels

hey everybody it's john at midnight damn body here with you again in this video we're going to be welding in some wheel large repair panels on a 2010 gmc truck [Music] okay so let's go in and i'll kind of show you guys what we're working with here i just did a kind of a quick tear down on it um in this case i'm just going to mask off the chrome and stuff on this truck because it's just just a work truck just want to fix the rust um no point getting in all the extra expense replacing chrome um so as you can see like you see in a lot of these gm trucks these all hold a ton of moisture up in behind you know all the dirt i don't know if i'll be able to see in there let's grab a light i'm always kind of trying to tell people how these are i guess we can't really see in there but all the dirt gets in between the welded panels you know not up in here but up inside so dirt sits in there stays wet rust them through um happens with every truck whether you know ford dodge gm they're all the same so we're gonna be putting in some replacement wheel arches now as you can see on these you get a whole lot of extra sheet metal now depending on how rusty your truck is the idea of these panels i mean isn't to stick it on and trace around and cut it out the idea is to use what you need off them so you know this truck's not too bad i suspect once we get up just above that body line we're gonna be back into clean metal on the inside so that's typically what i do first i'll kind of cut it out trim it back and see where we're going to um i'll probably bring the panel up somewhere around here and butt weld it in there but we'll see once we get into it and one other thing to mention i've already unhooked the battery if uh you know anytime you're working on a modern vehicle like this um always unhook the battery especially with welding because there's a lot of electronics going on in there and you don't want to be paying to fix them so i'll grab a grinder and we'll get cutting [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] so i've gone ahead and trimmed that panel back just to make it more manageable so now we're gonna clamp it tight into place i'll clamp it to the to the lip and then we're gonna trim around where we're going to be butt welding it the panel fits nice it's all tight to the body all the way around there so now i'm going to trim where we're going to be cutting probably a lot of them actually going to cut through both panels at the same time and then we know we're going to have that nice fit [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right so that's ready to start putting some weld on just kind of working around a little bit so it's going to be a whole lot of tacking and letting it cool you don't want to work the heck out of that panel i'm going to bring the camera in let's see if i can bear with me here we go so you can see i've got got a nice fit there it's it's pushed out just a hair it just needs just a little bit there but i've got a nice little gap there that'll fill with weld and that'll make a really nice repair [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] something [Applause] [Music] [Applause] big [Music] [Applause] [Music] bang [Music] okay there's that weld kind of ground down cleaned up um so what i'm gonna do now i'll take the welder and i'll just check for any little pin holes in the welds that i can see get those touched up and then i'm gonna jump to the other side repeat this process and i will bring you guys back when i'm ready to start doing some bodywork on this just cutting into the other side on this truck here so i just thought i would show you guys a little better why you get this on the outside is because of this on the inside see what i mean it's all wet like i was saying earlier in the video if you get that tail i don't get your pressure washer in there you know once a year even blow all that stuff out of there so you don't have that wet dirt sitting in there it's gonna make your trucks last a lot longer you know no matter what make you drive they're all the same they all hold that dirt in there the same way so just a little tech tip i'm going to carry on okay i have the other side all welded up so looks the same as the side we were just working on so i figured it may as well take you guys kind of through the the bodywork steps a little bit too i don't know that i'll get into primer and paint i've done that stuff in videos before but what i do next on these i'm going to mix up some it's a short strand fiberglass filler and what i do with that it's basically just a coat to fill in the welds and i'd like to really smash it in there and that's going to give it some extra protection you know i have gone around and touched up wherever i could see anything in the welds that that looks like it could let something through but if there is a little porosity left somewhere that fiberglass filler is going to give it that that extra bit and then at the end after everything's painted i will be treating the back side of the panel as well all right so let's mix some filler all right so i always kind of hate this part you know i always feel like it looks like you know you do all this work and then all you're doing is just mucking it all up with body filler but that's probably why most guys don't show you this part or you know the tv shows they do all this beautiful metal work but they don't show yet they code everything just filler after so this may look like a lot but it's really not but you know i'm going to code all of this but really it's just leveling the service i'm going to be taking most of it back off you know i bet you i don't know a third of it actually stays on the panel or something [Music] all right so we'll come back to this in a few minutes and i'll show you how like you say most of that will be pretty much coming back off the panel this is just going to level everything out nicely and like i said give it that little extra protection so i'm going to knock down this fiberglass filler um we're just going to be using this big machine this isn't really for body work um but this is just going to take it down fast and like i say it's just kind of the beginning of getting the correct shape for everything [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so i've taken most of that off you can see it's just kind of staying in the low spots um actually i'm gonna take that down just a little bit more and then the next step from there will be a coat of body filler and we'll block that out properly and yeah but it is the end of the day so i'm probably just going to finish this up and we'll start on the filler in the morning [Music] do [Music] all right so i just kind of sped through that part with you guys so so there's a coat of uh body filler on there and it's all sanded i'm pretty much ready for primer i just need to feather out the rest of the panel um so you can see um that was i mean we did all the welding that was a coat of short strand fiberglass filler like i said just kind of fills in the welds gives a little extra protection and then that was just really just one light coat of body filler because it didn't need much there was a couple kind of low spots you can see a bit of a different color where i did add just just a hair more so next step i've just got to finish up a bit on the other side i'll be sticking this thing in the old paint booth to put some primer on it um so yeah i don't know how much i'll i'll keep going through i know i've done videos and all that stuff before so i might just kind of skip ahead at this point next time you guys will see it'll probably be shiny and painted and ready for the customer so i'm gonna get back at her all right better in the paint move for some primer so i'm just gonna get that done up and then we'll come back for another look all right just like that she's all in primer so i'll let that cure we'll get her prepped up and get some paint on it well there it is just like that ready to paint first need to harness some paint energy and bam it's all painted all right well it's only been an hour as though it's setting up good but i'm gonna keep some heat on in here for a couple hours we'll pull it out of the booth and have one last look at it all right so she is out of the booth all put together just needs a quick wash and be ready for the customer so thanks for following along i hope that you know potentially help someone out with their projects and you know like i've said in these videos before i am uh just a pretty average auto body guy scraping out of living doing this stuff but i do hope that helps someone else with their projects and as always thanks so much for watching i do hope to see you guys on the next video

Channel: Midnight Paint & Body

Views: 32,657

Keywords: Rust repair panels, Repairing rust, fixing rust, rust repair, GM bedside repair, weld in repair panels, splicing panels, autobody, body work, rust fix, body shop

Id: Dc7wcZbjdE4

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 26 2022