Greetings,
I'm fairly new to the forum, been soaking up the vast knowledge available. But I've been getting lurker's remorse, so I figured I better post something (hopefully) helpful. I bought a 96 tracker about 2 weeks ago, and have been going through it and fixing the areas that need attention.
My first project was to fix some door sill rot. The rocker panels themselves are in decent shape, so I only needed to do some patch work.
Ok, so there's some light rot, and it looks like the previous owner gave it a bondo bandaid. First step is to remove the paint, and see what's really going on.
I've found that a rust/paint stripper attached to a high speed drill like the one pictured below worked better then even a wire wheel attached to my grinder.
Once I've accessed the damage - not too bad; I decided to cut out the bad piece and weld in a new one. I used a super thin cut-off wheel on my grinder and cut out a nice rectangle section. This should help making the fabrication of the new metal fairly easy, just a rectangle with a straight bend.
*take note - all of the rear vehicle's wiring runs through here. So be careful cutting, and even more careful when welding.Now I haven't really welded anything before, I once played with an old arc welder, but that was years ago. but I figured I'm mechanically inclined - how hard could it be. So I got some basic instuctions from my brother borrowed his mig welder, and proceeded on my way. He left me with on piece of advise that certainly held true. "You don't have to be a good welder, but you'll have to be a great grinder". Oh - so very true!
Before you start welding:
- Remove all paint and rust a few inches from where the actual weld is going to be. A mig welder really needs nice shiny metal to work well.
- Disconnect your battery
- Make sure you have a good ground - I found the closer the ground is to the area you're welding the better.
- Position your patch and tack in it place, just a couple in each corner.
- Make sure it's still in place, and proceed to work tacks around the patch.
- If you try and run a bead it will warp the metal, so stick to tacking it or at least short 1" beads
Here's my first attempt. The plate shifted to the right, and was also much lower on the right. I wasn't happy with this.
I primed it to help get a better look, still don't like it. I decided to cut it out and start again.
Continued below...