You know, I didn't "get" these until I drove one. My nephew has a 1995 with the OM606 diesel. Although it's glacially slow, it just drives so nice and it's extremely comfortable to ride in. Thanks for giving everyone a peek at what ownership looks like. That's going to look great dropped on those AMG wheels!
Strike while the iron's hot!
As it is still in the upper 20's here in sunny Minnesota I decided I would continue to utilize the motivation/weather Venn diagram overlap and keep poking at the Benz. Today's subject is unseen inner wheel house rust. As you may recall from an earlier post I discovered this little nugget when cutting springs.
I employed some new-to-me strategies on this particular patch. First, one must exercise the demons and get back to solid steel. As this was a pretty small spot I used a combination of Dremel with sanding disc and die-grinder with tubular deburring/grinding bit.
Naturally the hole got bigger, but now we're playing with some nice solid sheet metal. I used a wire cup brush on my drill to remove the undercoating in the area in question. It didn't work so great, that stuff is really on there!
Once the hole was shaped I put my little sanding discs on the die grinder and really got things cleaned up. I often use flux core wire when welding in sheet metal, it seems to work nice in the rusty, crappy areas I'm usually playing with. This time I actually had solid core wire and shielding gas so I went with that. It's nicer overall but seems to need the area to be much more sanitary.
Then, I tried to employ the CAD method, but mostly ended up using this as a guide and just free handing the little piece with some tin snips and my bench grinder.
That got us here. Which after some bad ground clamp placement and various other little issues got us here.
Boogered in and ground down. Lest you judge this too hard I have a confession to make.
I often consider myself a competent-ish mechanic. I'm by no means a professional but I can usually accomplish what I set out to do, and I still get excited to learn new things.
Anyhow, occasionally (often when doing body repairs it seems) I wonder if I should be allowed to have a welder at all. This really isn't that bad, but it also isn't that good. The boogers connecting the patch to the spring pocket are especially juicy to me. Ultimately this will probably only ever be seen by me and the 3 or 4 people reading this thread. Once painted and undercoated I suspect it will go unnoticed for decades to come. So with that in mind I let my task-completion brain take over and burned it in. Still, it makes me chuckle sometimes when I finish something like this and ask myself "is this really better?". In this case that answer is yes though it could be more-gooder-betterer with more effort and attention to detail.
And, a couple of super wet coats of primer and paint over dirty, cold undercoating and hot bare steel. In a 25 degree garage. This is going to be finished* for now with a mental note to get some rubberized undercoating and really seal this area up on a sunny spring day. I figure I can just jack up this corner and probably won't even have to turn the wheels. Call this good enough.
I am pleased I did this before setting the car back down in it's new lowered state, because I have a tendency to ignore these little problems once a car looks a certain way.
Actually ignore isn't completely accurate. I can definitely see myself not fixing this now, lowering the car, then overthinking the difficulty of the repair and letting it eat away at my enjoyment of the car little by little until I eventually sell it.
Speaking of lowered - TaDa!
I love it.
Have you tried the tack, tack, tack method of welding thin sheetmetal?
Basically, you make a small tack, let it cool slightly, offset the next tack by about 1/3 overlap, tack, repeat, tack, repeat. Trying to run a bead on thin, old sheetmetal is hopeless and results in either cold welds (what this looks like from here), or burn through.
You got a good result that isn't noticeable. Good job!
The car looks fantastic lowered on those AMG wheels!
In reply to wvumtnbkr :
Good call on the cold welds, I think you're correct. I'm going to try and make mental note of that; admittedly I'm not that good at dialing in the welder settings for each project.
On larger patches I usually do the tack-move-tack method, I guess I just decided to try and zing this one in. The fit of the patch wasn't great either so it was destined for imperfection from the beginning.
In reply to dculberson :
Thank you!
Looks great! Sits perfectly now.
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