Hey guys chrisfix here and today, I'm going to show you how to permanently and properly repair a rust hole in your car. In this case, our rust hole is in the floorboard. So let's go underneath the car and let me show you the rust. We need to repair so right here is the floor of the car.

This is where your seat bolts into this, is where your feet go, and this right here is a large rust hole. Not only does it go through to the interior, but right here is a structural point for the suspension. It ties right into the floorboard and there's a giant hole. So that's definitely not good.

This needs to be repaired now. Not only does this need to be repaired for safety reasons, but it also has to be repaired, because we want to double the horsepower of this car with a turbo kit and don't worry, there will be an in-depth DIY video on how to install your very own Turbo kit, with common hand tools, but before we do that, we need to fix some odds and ends to make this safe and reliable for double the horsepower, also just for driving around in general. We need to fix that rust hole and in order to fix that rust hole here, are all the tools and products that you're going to need. You are going to need a welder.

Don't worry I'll explain more about this, but you can find them as cheap as a hundred bucks and I'll get more into that as we get to the welding portion. That's not the difficult part. The difficult part is the cutting portion and you'll see. Why and here's the rest of the tools that you're gon na need, as always get those safety glasses on first and as you can see, we don't need many tools at all to get the job done.

We have an angle grinder with a wire wheel attachment. We have a drill and the reason why we have a drills because we're gon na be using a sheet metal nibbler. This is really helpful for cutting sheet metal and it works great. I can't wait to show you how that works.

Then we have a 12 millimeter socket because we need to remove the seat to get to our hole, and then we have our sheet metal. Now the sheet metal could be sourced from an actual car, maybe from a junkyard, maybe somebody's parting out a car. Maybe somebody has a shell whatever it is see if you can get some sheet metal like this and it'll fit right in. But let's just say you can't get sheet metal like this.

Well, you could go to a store and buy a sheet metal. That's a similar thickness and then you could cut out the part that you need to patch the hole. But if your holes very large or you need an entire floorboard most of the time, those floorboards could be found aftermarket and you cut out your old floorboards and you put in the new one and you weld it in. So you could search that online for your year make and model no matter what method you use to get your sheet metal after watching this video you'll be able to patch the hole in car now, the last thing to do after we patch the hole is to Paint it so that we have a sealed surface oxygen and water can't penetrate so we don't get rust again and that's all there is to it now before we go and start cutting out that old, rust and welding in a new floor board.

The first thing you need to do very important. The first thing is make sure you find out why it rusted. You need to stop it from rusting again most of the times, because water gets in there. It sits there and over time it rusts, especially on a car like this, which is a convertible check.

This out, this seal is known to go bed since this top comes off and, as you can see, there's pulling water down there rained yesterday. So you need to figure out where your water is coming from. In this case we know it's coming from this weather stripping right here, so, let's real quickly swap it out. First, we need to remove the top to get to this weather stripping.

Then it's held in by two Phillips head screws, so remove the first one and the second one good, and then we could peel the weather stripping off the pinch, weld to remove it and sometimes they use adhesive to hold the weather stripping on. But most of the time it's just pressed on like this, so it should come off pretty easily so out with the old and in with the new. But before we install the new weather stripping, we need to address some hidden rust and if we run into any rust like this, we want to address it by sanding it down and then painting it. So it doesn't rust any more.

So first send away the rust using a wire wheel and make sure you remove every speck of rust. Any rust that you leave is just gon na spread again with all the rust removed. Now we're down to shiny metal and we could use a special rust barrier, paint that coats the metal and will prevent future rust so spray on that paint and let it dry all right so with all the rust removed to bare metal. It's painted.

It's sealed. It won't rust again. I also did it in a couple other locations up here and a little bit down there. I removed all the rust and painted it.

We are ready to install our weather stripping, so get the weather stripping in place, and all you need to do is push it onto the pinch. Weld like that. It's super easy and the top part just fits into the channel, so press it in all the way and we're good to go. Finally, we need to screw these last two screws that hold it in place and that's all there is to it all right with our new weather stripping installed.

This looks awesome now we our water issues, so we won't be getting any more water onto the carpet. So we won't get any more rust now. What we need to do is take the seat out, pull the carpeting up and get access to that rust hole, so we could cut it out. So the first thing we need to do: let's unbolt this seat, to remove the seat.

There are two 12 millimeter bolts in the front good, and now we could slide the seat forward, which gives us access to the two rear bolts, as well as the seat belt. Bolt and we're gon na have to remove that. So we could pull the carpet up good and now carefully remove the seat from the car. So we don't damage anything.

Then we could remove the floor, mat and unfortunately, my door, sill trim is broken, but that just pops out and finally, we could sneak that carpet out from underneath the rear, storage bins like so and then get the center console out of the way. And then we can move the carpet to the side, all right so with the carpet pushed up out of the way I actually have a bungee cord to the steering wheel, so we don't have to worry about the carpet falling down if we're cutting or welding. We don't want this to catch fire or get in our way. Now we could take a look at what we have to work here and unfortunately, this hole seems a little bit bigger than it looked underneath.

It looks like this is solid, which is good, but it looks like we do have a bunch of rust here. Another good thing is in the front here you can see it's all good sheet metal. I don't see any rust, which is good. Hopefully, this is just surface rust here, so we're gon na just go around here and see with the grinder where our surface rust is versus, where our bad rust is.

So, let's get that done now, since we're going to be using a grinder to grind away all this rust, it's gon na create a lot of dust, so it's very important. You need to make sure you have. I protect and a good dust mask now. This is an n95 dust mask it's better than nothing, but our only filters out 95 % of the particles in the air and these glasses are good because it'll prevent things from hitting your eyes, but air could get around it and dust could still get in your Eyes, so what I prefer is a mask like this.

This works way better. It completely seals your face, so you can't get anything in your eyes. You can see here we have a seal on the outside and we have a seal around your nose double-sealed - and this is a p100 filter which filters out 99.97 % of dust in the air, which is a lot better. You don't want to be breathing this stuff.

In especially since we're kind of in an enclosed area, it's a good idea to find a mask or a half mask like this with the p100 filters. So that's my recommendation and since we don't want to get dust all over the interior of the car to breathe it in another idea that I had that you don't have to do. But it's helpful is get something like this. So I bought some 6-inch ducting tube and you can see very simple but it'll work and then a blower motor Finn and I'm gon na have negative pressure.

So this is gon na suck all that dusty air out of the car. And then you could put a filter on the end of here, so you could blow it out far away. This is about 20 feet long, so I can keep it away from me. Get that air filtered and then we don't have to worry about that dust.

Getting all over the interior of the car, because that would just make a mess so just another thing that you guys can do you don't need to just giving you some ideas. So, let's see how bad this rust really is all right moment of truth with our wire wheel. We got the vent going and let's have at it now it's very important to send down the entire floorboard. There could easily be hidden rusts.

Also, you want to remove as much rust as you possibly can and get down to that shiny metal and don't forget to get into all those nooks and crannies, so you can get a good idea of what we need to cut out. Speaking of nooks and crannies, we also want to remove any seam sealer. We have near the rust, so we can see if there's damage underneath that so just grab a flathead, screwdriver or a scraper, or something like that, and you want to scrape away the seam sealer. This seam sealer is used by the factory because they don't weld the entire seam, so they need to prevent moisture from getting in there which causes rust.

So they add this on top and with the seam sealer removed. You can see I'm hitting this area here, just to see how strong it is, and this is solid, which is good news so with our seam sealer removed from all the spots where we want to check out, see if there's any rust - and we have this whole Surface sanded down, so we can see how bad the rust is. There's one more place we need to check, and that is to check underneath the car, and we want to take a look under here to see how bad the rust is on this side as well. So just like up top, we want to get to the bare metal surface so wire wheel, all the undercoating away to expose the metal and be sure to remove the undercoating a couple inches past the rust hole.

Sometimes the rust creeps up underneath the undercoating and you could miss it. If you don't do that, so here's what it looked like before, with all the undercoating covering all the sheet metal. So we couldn't see - and here's the after now look at how much more we could see in here with removing that under coating like right here. This right here didn't look like it was rusted through from the top, but from the bottom you could see.

There's holes so we're gon na have to cut this out gon na cut along here. This metal is actually good over here, which is good and then we're gon na to come up to above here now. The nice thing is the metal up here. This top part is good.

This metal right here is gon na get cut out, but this metal up here we're gon na be able to butt up against it and weld right to that which is awesome. So let's take a look at this from the other side. Now, looking from the top you can see, I drew a line that shows exactly where we're gon na cut out going around all the rust, and then we have all good metal on the outside here that we could weld to and then paint later on. And one thing I want to show you: how can you tell the difference between bad metal and good metal? Why did this line get drawn here? Why not like all the way out here? Well, this metal over here that is solid this metal over here.

I could punch right through that. So that's how I came up with that line here. This metal is still good. It's just surface rust will be able to weld right to it.

So with that we know all this metal is bad and all this metal here is good. Let's go cut out the bad metal and you could cut this out a bunch of different ways. You could get a cut off wheel and just cut out this whole thing. You get a plasma cutter, you could get a saw, the possibilities are endless.

What I'm gon na be using is a sheet metal nibbler. When you pull the trigger on the drill, the end of the tool has like a little punch that punches out the sheet metal. Little by little, it's basically taking little nibbles out of that sheet metal. So this is super easy to use it's a versatile tool.

You could cut in any direction and it's perfect for this sheet metal. So let me show you how to use it all. You have to do is put the sheet metal in the opening of the nibbler and push it in the direction you want to cut. That's all there is to it like I said you could use any tool.

You want to cut this metal out, but I thought this was a good tool for the job. Where you have good control, you can make Street even lines and it's pretty accessible to everybody. All you need is a drill. Also, as you get more comfortable with this, you could crank this baby up to full speed and get stuff cut out even quicker.

Overall, the tool is easy and safe to use and also doing it from under the car gives you more room to move the drill around. So it's a lot easier, so you get the idea, make sure you cut out all the rust it's pretty simple and any spots that aren't clean cut like this, don't worry, you could use a file to straighten out the edges, but at this stage it doesn't have To be perfect, just get it a little bit straighter like that. So there we go. That's a nice clean cut and we cleaned up all the edges with the we could clean it up a little bit more, but we might as well wait.

This is gon na, be a nice easy shape to cut out of our new sheet metal. So this is perfect and we got rid of all that old rust and we even got rid of some good material so that we know for sure the rust was cut out. I was really impressed with this sheet metal nibbler. It worked perfect.

The only part it was a little bit difficult to use with is when the sheet metal wasn't completely flat. It had a little indent or a valley in there. You really had to twist it and turn it with that valley. So it's level the whole time.

Otherwise, it worked perfect so now, with all the rust removed, we could take our sheet metal and what we're gon na have to do is we're gon na have to cut this sheet metal the same shape as our hole, and you can see. We have some good points that we could reference such as this piece right here matches exactly this piece right here, so we just have to cut around that. So, let's roughly mark this up on where we want to make our initial cuts and just compare your hole to the sheet metal and mark it up, it doesn't have to be perfect if anything make it a little bit bigger, because you could always trim more metal Off later, then again, this is just a rough shape. I just want to get my first cut done and then I could go match it up, make sure I get it more accurate.

So let's get this cut out and to cut out these lines on the sheet metal, I'm using the sheet metal. Nibbler remember this is just a first rough cut, so don't go crazy, trying to make it perfect and just to show you there are other tools you could use like this cutoff wheel on an angle grinder so use whatever you have and then after we're done making Our cuts check it out. We have a rough shape that looks pretty good and, let's see how we did not bad now, we want to mark up the spots that we could trim to make this fit better and the easiest way to do this is just to trace the shape of the Hole onto the new metal, so we know where to cut and with that all marked up, let's cut this metal to shape. Now I want to have a little buffer between my cut and the line, because I could always go back and easily take off more metal, but it's harder to add metal on so leave a little bit of room between your cut and your line.

Then we can bring it back and see how it looks getting better for sure. But now we need to be more precise. So let's make some reference marks, which are just some lines on the new sheet metal that go over to the old sheet metal in different spots, along the edge that way, we could easily align the sheet metal to the same exact spot when we make a new Cut and then come back to see how we did so what the reference marks made. Let's cut this more precisely and get a tight fit.

This is the most tedious but important part. We need to cut the metal to where we think it's gon na fit up. Nice and tight and then we need to go test, fit it and see how we did. Then we need to cut it some more again with the goal of getting it to fit as tight as possible and then go back and test fit it again and see how we did you want to make small adjustments.

So you don't cut too much material away and you can see I'm getting closer and closer to that green line. I drew all right now, Pitman. Is everything so spend your time on doing that? We're still not done, there's still little adjustments I need to make. I want to show you, and I also want to show you it's not gon na, be perfect.

You see right there there's a little bit of a gap. Well, that's what happens. There's solutions to that when we weld not a big deal. We just want to try to get a really tight edge all the way around if possible, and this looks really good.

The only thing I need to do is right there. I need to sand away just a little bit of material, so I'm gon na go. Do that and then this should be ready to go for the fine adjustments like this I'm using a file, so we don't remove too much material and just file away a thin layer of metal and then let's test fit it beautiful, and this is a nice tight Fit that's exactly what we want all right now check this out. This looks so good.

All the edges are buttered up against each other, nice and tight, even though we do have a couple of holes like that I'll show you guys how to work with that. But next what we need to do is we need to prepare both this piece of metal and this piece of metal so that we could weld them together and real quick. I want to mention something because it's very important what we're doing here is called butt welding. We're taking the two pieces of metal and we're Budig them up to each other, so that there's no gap - and this is really good.

This is the best type of welding you could do, especially for quarter panels or floors, because the metal comes right up against each other and there's no seam, there's no chance for rust, but it does take the longest because we do have to make sure this is Perfectly cut: we have to go back and forth and make sure we trim it and get it to fit and butt up against each other nicely. But there is another method: that's a lot easier and that's called a lap weld. So this hole right here. This circular hole, let's just say we wanted to fill that instead of cutting it out perfectly like we did here a perfect circle.

What we do is we just cut out. A piece of metal doesn't have to be perfect and you place it either over or underneath, and then you weld all the seams. You can even weld the bottom if you want. This is a lot quicker because you don't have to cut a perfect circle.

You could just cut a square like this and fit it in and weld it now your holes sealed the downside is, you could get moisture in between the two pieces of metal that'll cause rust later on, and also this is not flat anymore. We have a bump here for a floorboard that doesn't really matter you're more concerned about that rust, but hey the factory does lap welds. So as long as you put a bunch of paint and seam sealer on it, it'll last for a good long time. But I like to show you guys the best method possible, and that is the butt weld.

So that's why I did it that way, but I did want to let you know you can lap weld something. A lot quicker, a lot easier and it'll get the job done. It's just not as good alright, so whether you're gon na butt weld your metal or you're gon na lap weld your metal. The next part is very important, and that is prepping the surface for welding.

Just like you need a prepper surface for painting to get the best paint job. You need to prep your metal surfaces for welding, so you could get good welds that are contaminant free. What I mean by that is you can't have any seam sealer. You can't have any paint galvanization any rust and the undercoating any of that can't be near where you're welding, otherwise you're gon na contaminate the welds and that's gon na cause.

Welds cracking you won't get good penetration, you get porosity all bad things, so let me show you how to properly prep this so that we could get good welds. So the main thing you want to do to prep the metal surface is sand down the edge where you're gon na weld I'm using a wire wheel to do this, and you only need to do the parts that you're welding. You don't have to waste your time. Sending the entire piece down and there we go check it out, so you can see right around the whole perimeter about a half an inch to an inch wide.

We have bare metal and we have that on both sides. So this is all ready to get welded into the car. So not only do we need to do this side, but we also have to do the other side of the metal as well so same thing sand the floor down where we're gon na weld and good and don't forget to do the underside as well and then Finally, the last thing we want to do is we want to get some isopropyl alcohol or acetone, and then we want to wipe down our bare metal surface that we're gon na weld on just want to get it clean from any oils or any extra dirt and Debris - and this is gon na - be our final prep step. Also, don't forget to do the little cutout piece of metal that you have and just get all these surfaces, nice and degreased good.

So this is everything you need to do to prep the metal to get it ready for welding, so that mean we're ready to weld. So let me show you how to do that, and this is the thin gauge sheet metal, which makes it really difficult to well. But don't worry, I have a bunch of tips and tricks which are gon na help you. So the first thing I want to cover is: what kind of welder should you use? This is a MIG welder.

This is a flux, core welder, let's start here. This is a great beginner welder, it's relatively affordable at $ 100 and you don't need any gas now. You don't need gas, because this uses flux, core wire flux, core wire has a hollow core and inside that core is flux which ends up being your shielding gas. So you could get good welds now.

The problem with that is, you can see right here. The thinnest wire we could get for this machine is point O 3, Oh inches, because it has to be hollow, and that means we could only weld down to 22 gauge or 0.8 millimeter. Our metal is even thinner than that. So technically we can't use this.

We could probably use it and work around a little bit, but really it's not within the scope of this machine. So what I recommend is getting something like this. This is a MIG welder is a gas welder. It's a little more expensive starts around about $ 200 and you need to get gas I'll cover that in a second, but the benefit is you have a lot of flexibility? You could change your wire speed, you could change your voltage and, more importantly, we're able to get the wire we need, since we're using guess we're able to get down to 0.025 inch wire, which is really thin, and if we check out our chart here, it says 24 gauge point 6 millimeter, which is the thickness of our sheet metal, we'll work with our point: o2.

5 wire. Now let me give you a little more information on how to use a welder so that you guys could set up your welder and get started. At least have a basic idea of what you're doing so. The first thing you want to do to get the correct settings for your welder is grab a digital caliper, zero.

It out grab a piece of your sheet metal. I already did this, but you just want to see how thick your sheet metal actually is. In this case, you can see it's about 0.6 millimeters thick. Now we can check out the settings we can see.

We have 24 gauge metal at 0.6 millimeters thick and we want to go 3 volts and we want to have a wire speed of 25. So on our welder, we could go to our voltage. We need to set this to 3 volts and then our wire speed set to 25. We can make adjustments later, probably going to adjust the wire speed and keep the voltage the same I'll.

Show you how to do that now. Let me show you the gas MIG welding steel you're, pretty much always going to be using 25 percent co2. 75 percent argon. Don't worry, go to your local gas supply.

They know exactly what you need from big welding. They'll set you up now. All you have to do is open up this bottle all the way like so and then what we have to do is pay attention to this gauge right here. This will let us know how much air is coming out of our welding gun when we press the trigger.

So, let's turn this to open it and where we want to be on this gauge is at 10 liters per minute, which is the black or 20 CF H, which is the red. You can see we're up a little bit. That's fine! Let's turn the welder on and now grab your gun and you want to lightly tap the trigger. Actually, that's almost perfect and you can see how the pressure drops down as the triggers tapped.

That's how much flow our nozzle has when we press the trigger, and that is spot-on. I got lucky on that first shot. So that's how you dial in your air to the correct flow rate and then the last thing is the amount of wire you want. Sticking out when you start is just a little bit past the nozzle like that.

That's perfect! So let's go practice. Our welding and I know you're gon na be tempted to start welding in your car right away, but don't you always have to do a few practice? Welds, so I have some scrap sheet metal that we cut out and we're gon na practice on that and make sure our settings are good and also just for practice for such a thin sheet metal. So get your welding helmet on then get your welding gloves on. Have a fire extinguisher nearby and let's see how dialed in we are, and we are not dialed in at all, and that was pretty bad.

So, let's crank up the wire speed to 35, all right a little bit better, but this should sound like frying bacon that sizzling sound. So let's try a wire speed of 45 and that's better. This seems pretty good. This sounds more like frying bacon and we aren't blowing through, and this is exactly where we need to be, and now we want to inspect our weld.

So when we started out, we had the wrong settings. We made some fine adjustments just on wire speed until we were pretty good now to make sure we're pretty good yeah check that out see how this goes all the way through the weld penetrates through the metal, but it doesn't burn through that's what we want. So now that we're dialed in we could go and start welding in our car, and I almost forgot, which is why I wrote this note, make sure you remove the neg cable from the battery before you weld. The welder is pushing a lot of amps into the metal of the car, so removing the negative cable helps prevent the electricity from frying, the computer or sensors, to remember to disconnect the negative cable from the battery.

So with that negative cable removed, we are ready to weld. I also have a welding blanket set up, so we don't damage any of the interior pieces and I have our vent, so we don't breathe in any of the fumes. So now, let's position our sheet metal into the hole, so it fits there nice and tight like so now. One of the most important things to a successful weld is putting your ground clamp somewhere near your welding surface.

That's very clean! So like a clean piece of metal or a bolt, some people weld on the bolt to the sheet metal. In this case we could just use where the seat belt connects I'll screw this in and then now we have a really good ground, clamp area like that. That's gon na allow us to have good welds all right now, we're ready to finally weld this piece of metal in and what we're gon na be doing is called a tack weld. This is when you weld one spot for just a second to fuse the two pieces of metal.

Together, you want to tack weld a few different spots around the sheetmetal that way the metal is held in place. Here's what a tack weld looks like up close. You can see the weld is small and focused in one spot and it fuses both pieces of metal together. This weld has good penetration, it's not a glob of metal on the surface and it's relatively flat.

So this is exactly what a good tack looks like another thing: we need to keep an eye on, as we tack weld is making sure the two pieces of sheet metal are level you can see here. There's a large gap and the two pieces are not level so grab two hammers one above and one below, and we're gon na hammer from below the top hammers used to keep the metal level. As you hammer it up from the bottom like so and check it out, this work perfect, nice and level. Okay.

So that's the process! You work your way around the sheet metal tack welded in if a spot doesn't fit right, use a hammer to hit it in place and make it so that it's even and level alright. So, since everything is tacked in all the way around, we use that hammer to make sure all our surfaces are. Even we are ready to do something called stitch welding now, unfortunately, we can't just run a weld all the way across and down and all the way across, if you do that, the metal is gon na warp, you're, probably gon na blow through from adding too much Heat to one section at a time, so we do something called stitch welding, for example, we'll go from this weld to this weld and stop and then we'll go find another tack-weld over here. We'll go from this weld to that weld and stop and then we'll find a tack weld over here, we'll go from this world to that weld and stop and we're spreading the heat out.

So we don't blow through. We don't warp this and we let these other welds cool down before we go and weld next to that one. So now you have an idea of how we're gon na stitch weld all these pieces together. The one thing we're gon na do is we're gon na ignore all the spots where there's big gaps, I'm going to show you how to fix that at the end.

So don't worry about stitch welding that right now just stitch weld all the good pieces of metal that are buttered up next to each other, so we'll start right there. So what you're looking at right now is exactly what it looks like through a welding mask. What you see here is exactly what I see so, let's stitch weld this you're gon na start over here at this tack, weld hold the trigger for a second, then let it cool down hold the trigger for a second, then let it cool down, pull the trigger For a second and let it cool down now you can see that bright orange puddle, it's literally molten metal. You know when that puddle is cool when it has a dull orange glow.

That's when you want to do the next. Well, then you let it cool to a dull orange, and then you start your next weld. You want to add wire to the puddle for only about a second, because if it gets too hot you're gon na melt, the surrounding super thin sheet metal and that's just gon na create holes, and I think this is a really good visual of the process. You want to repeat this until you get to the next tack weld and check this out.

We started a little cold since there was no heat into the metal, but by the third or fourth weld. We were perfect. So that's a good example of a stitch weld. Let's do another, so, let's start at the tack weld and just like the last seam weld, I'm doing short trigger pulls, so we don't overheat the metal.

And if you listen, you could hear a slight difference in what this weld sounds like compared to the last seam weld. This one doesn't sound like frying bacon, so our settings are a little bit off and I think we need to increase the wire speed. Although the welds are looking pretty good, so I'm just gon na continue also take a look right in front of the puddle. You can see, there's a hole forming every time I add metal, that's from the metal getting too hot, so I'm gon na stop welding and let this cool so after letting this cool for 20 seconds.

Let's finish the stitch weld and I'm going to be quiet. So you can listen and watch the rest of this stitch all right and that's pretty good. Now we did make a little bit of a change here. We did a little bit of welding, it got too hot.

I saw it blowing through. So I decided this stop. Let it cool down, gave it about 15 seconds and then restarted, and that looks pretty good and he blow through that. We had.

I just built the puddle up a little bit more. I focused the metal going in on that puddle rather than on the two pieces of thin sheet metal. Sure it's not as flat as I'd like it, but it's a floorboard, so not a big deal, and this is solid. Now let me show you the penetration from under the car.

This is a little more penetration than I like to see, but this sheet metal is super thin and I really can't complain it's definitely better to have a little too much penetration and make sure those two pieces of metal are welded solid together, then not have enough Penetration, so let me knock out the rest of these stitch, welds off-camera, so that I could get this done. You know how to do it. You get the idea. I don't want to bore you and then we'll move on to the gaps here and I'll.

Show you how to fix those, and just so you have an idea. I stitch welded this entire panel up in about 30 minutes. Alright, and I am done stitch welding, this entire piece in it is solid, that's not going anywhere and remember. This is my first time welding point six millimeter thick sheet metal.

That is really thin for you, guys out there anytime, you're welding. The first time don't expect to weld dimes. The key is to make sure you have good weld penetration and you're bonding both pieces of metal together, so that it's solid. This is a floor.

Remember this is gon na get covered in paint in carpet. Nobody's gon na see it. So structural rigidity is the most important thing now to successfully fill all the gaps and not have any more burn through. What I'm gon na do is use a piece of copper.

This is a flattened, copper pipe. You could also use a sheet of copper or even aluminum. Aluminum is gon na work as well both of those metals the welds won't stick to, and they act really well as a heat sink. They absorb the heat, so we're gon na do with this you're gon na place this underneath the gap and then you're gon na use that Jack or some magnets to hold this in place, and with that copper, heatsink pressed up against the bottom of our hole.

That's gon na absorb any heat that we introduce into this, and it's gon na be a lot easier to weld this hole up now you can see there's a lot of thick metal right here. So what I'm gon na do is I'm gon na focus the heat on this metal, build up my puddle and then work along to there. Okay, let's get this gap filled, so you can see I'm focusing the welding wire onto that last weld because it's thicker metal and I'm basically growing the puddle outwards to cover the ghin notice, how I could weld for longer and if I get any burn through. I just stop and let it cool then I resume and let the puddle build up again.

So it covers the hole and he saw how well our heatsink worked. You can see that the welds do not stick to this, so that worked perfectly, and this was very hard to let it cool down. But this absorbs the heat. It prevents the weld from sticking and allows you to fill gaps just like that, while still getting penetration.

So I used the same exact method with the copper heatsink to fill all the large holes that were left, and now we have completely welded in our sheet metal and one way to verify. There are no gaps because there could be pinholes that you don't see. If your welds aren't perfect is you could wait till night and then go underneath the car and then shine a light upwards and look for any light leaking through or you could grab a box. I cut a little hole in it and the box is designed to keep the light out, so you can look for those pinholes even during the day, so just get a strong, LED light and shine it below the metal that you welded and so far so good.

I don't see any light leaking through there's no pinholes and then, if I bring my light down here at the bottom, where that factory hole is don't worry, we're gon na fill that with a plastic grommet when we're done. But if we bring it back here check that out, you see those two pin holes right at the bottom right there. That's what you're gon na look for that's two small holes that we would have otherwise missed if we didn't use this method, so we need to make sure we fill those and just to give you an idea of what it looks like in the daylight. There's the first small hole and then there's the second even smaller hole right there.

So it's a good little trick and now it's Fillies and finally, with those two simple welds. We have sealed this completely off. This is welded in and we are done, but not completely done, we're done welding now. What we need to do is we need to seal this.

We need to paint it so that we don't get rust, there's always going to be some moisture and some oxygen in the air that could cause this to rust. So painting is very important and to prep the surface for paint. We want to get rid of all that loose surface rust, which we did in order to weld so we're good with that. Then you want to grab your 80 grit sandpaper and we want to send the metal surface to give the paint something to grab onto 80.

Grit is pretty aggressive, so it's gon na leave some deeper scratches and that paint is gon na. Be able to adhere to that very well. Compared to a smooth surface, then vacuum up all the dust from sanding and finally clean off the surface with alcohol, which is going to remove any oils and on the metal so that we have a good clean surface for the paint distictive and look at all that Dirt we removed, and now we are ready to paint but never paint out of your container, because if you don't use it all the paint in the container is gon na. Go bad quicker.

So pour a little paint into the cup trying not to make a mess and a really cool trick to seal your paint can so it lasts a long time on the shelf, grab some plastic wrap and cover the can, but leave a little opening then grab one Of these compressed air dusters - and you want to slowly add air to the can the canned air that you're adding is actually r134a a refrigerant. So it's gon na sink down to the bottom and displace the oxygen, since it's heavier oxygen is what makes the paint Harden so without the oxygen. The paint is gon na, be like brand-new. The next time you open it now get your paint and spread a thin coat around the entire floorboard, making sure to work it into every nook and cranny.

I like to add the paint thick, so it covers everything, but don't leave it thick, make sure you spread it out nice and thin all right. So four hours later we know this is dry because my finger isn't sticking to the paint so with the new brush. Let's add our second thin coat of paint and again make sure this layer is thin. All right and 24 hours later check this out now it doesn't have to look perfect, but that does look pretty good for something that's gon na get covered by carpet.

The most important thing, though, is how it functions, and this is a special paint, that's impermeable. It goes on relatively thick and it creates a barrier between the metal and the air and moisture. That's gon na prevent rust and it seals in all of our welds as well, and since we did but welds and not lap welds, we don't need to use seam sealer. So this is a job well done and if you're wondering I sealed under the car as well, not only did I paint where we welded, but I also painted past that that way it seals it off really well, so our sheet metal is sealed on both sides.

Now, there's one more thing we need to do and that is install a rubber grommet in the factory hole. I assumed the previous owner left this undone to let the water drain out, but now we don't need that so just push it into place and there you go. That is how you properly repair a rust hole, whether it's in your quarter panel or if it's in your floor. That is the exact process that you want to follow.

I mean check it out. Here's a before and after and the best thing is, this repair was done properly, so it will outlast the life of this car, and now we have one last thing, and that is how you repair a rust hole in your vehicle. Hopefully the video was helpful if it was remember to give it a thumbs up, also consider hitting that subscribe button. There are a lot of really cool videos coming up with this car, including sound deadening.

It fixing the shifter, the turbo kit and many more and, as always, all the tools and products I used in this video are linked in the description. Stay tuned.