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Rust! Arggghh!

wildmanwes

Member
Joined
Jan 15, 2012
Location
Harrisburg,PA
Cleaning out the rear mud flaps revealed my nightmare about buying this 240. ('92 BTW)
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My previous 850's and 940's had never had any rust issues, so I'm pretty new to this. What's the best way to go about repairing this? I don't have any experience whatsoever with welding, so I'm assuming DIY is out of the question. What am I looking at by taking it to someone? I know a guy locally who does complete restorations/bodywork out of his house, so I'm thinking he won't charge as much as an actual body shop.
 
Had this issue x10 on my 82. Basically, go to junkyards with a sawzall and start cutting body parts off other 240's. Take em home, undo the spot welds, clean em up. The you cut the replacement panel to the size you need, hold it over the rust area, and scribe the line onto the car. Now using a cutoff wheel, dremel, body saw...cut out the ****ty panel. Using a flap disk perfect the fit between the hole and the new patch. Then MIG weld them in. Sometimes there are a few layers of rusty panels. In your case the quarter panel skin and the inner wheel arch are rusted at the seam. Once you remove the quarter panel skin according to your patch, you will want to replace a chunk of the inner wheel well.

This stuff is a lot of work btw. I started out with no knowledge of body work, bought a hobart handler mig and use .23 wire and just finished the welding.

It's dirty toxic and depressing at times, but it's a cool skill to learn.
 
You've got a huge job ahead of you if you're going to do a proper, first class repair.:omg: You might visit the Eastwood Company website and see what magic potions they sell to slow down the advance of the dreaded "tinworm".:nod:
 
fluid film

it must be those tires, most 240s i see with those end up rusting out.

the following MAY be an opinion.


I was trained and worked doing auto body and panel fab, and i have done this "both" ways.

this spot sucks, lots of seam sealer and undercoating fun.

the proper way is a bitch, takes time, and you really have to love the car, hate yourself, or both. it will take toxic chemicals, the right tools, and an understanding of the process as well. experience does not hurt either.
GOOD lasting body work takes time and WILL be expensive, and if it is not done well, or especially, not prepped well, especially with a car you are salting, the rust will just come back. if you take it to someone and it seems to cheap to be true, it probably will be...
anyway... there is an alternative you just may not like it.

while i can and have done this on a professional restoration level, i just don't really care to have perfect cars myself. i have other places time and money need to go.


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if you can live with your car being/looking "rusty", but want to slow the rust to a near stop, this is what i do these days on my own stuff that is non structural.


remove scale and anything loose. wash with soapy water and scrub, rinse with warm water, completely dry it with heat gun, apply fluid film, then hit it with heat gun again, repeat application and heating until saturated, then come back later and do it again if it needs it.

done!

now enjoy the smell of sheep, barnyard, apricots, and bandaids (almost like a good scotch) that is fluid film.

or if there is a hole that needs covered at that point i make a crude patch out of whatever metal i have around, cut extraneous body parts that may be in the way, fit it, drill it for rivets, apply metal roof sealant on the outer inside edge, stick on and rivet, make sure to wipe and clean anywhere you have the fluid film dripping before sticking the panel over.

you could also do the same and use POR15 instead, i have a small flock of sheep so i prefer the fluid film.

here in NH, state inspection states we cannot have "holes" in our cars, but they still keep throwing down that darned salt.

i can throw up pictures later of the last 240 i "properly" fixed, and the last one i "slopped"
the wife took the sloppy one to work though.
 
Sh*t, thats not encouraging news…I kinda wanted this car as a long term daily driver (5 yrs+), especially considering the fact we bought it for the steep price of $2500, expecting a damn near perfect car.

What's wrong with the tires? Put them on just a few months ago for the winter. Will be putting on my cooper CS5's here this week most likely.

As for treating the rust, if I wait until summer to tackle the job myself, will it be 10x worse? I have classes and internships all week with barely any time on the weekends and will be done with the semester in the beginning of May. This isn't and will not be a show car by any means, but I would like a semi-decent repair job that won't come back to bite me in the ass down the road.
 
Haha, good luck with that.

I had the same sh*t on my first 244. It was a nightmare to fix.

You can buy some imitation sheetmetal to fit in there, but it still requires a lot of hammering.

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:cries: Come on guys, gimme some sort of encouraging news! :lol: Fortunately the rest of the wheel wells are in good shape, seems like its just behind the right rear mud flap for now.
 
:omg: How long until my buttcheeks start looking like your 242? :omg:

The original owner took it to a shop and dumped almost $6 big ones in paint and interior.
The paint is very good but the rust repair was Bondo and nothing more.

The rust came back hard!

I have a complete shell (my rust free 80kmile'83 GLT) so I have to make a decision.
Shell swap and call it an original flathood or cut both cars up and salvage as much of the original car as possible.
I should sell them as a project and stop worrying about it!:grrr:
 
Thanks for the pointer, just saved your barn find thread to my bookmarks. Did you end up putting new sheet metal in there, or sheet metal from another 242?
 
odinthewanderer, is this sort of like the repair you're describing? http://www.vclassics.com/archive/rust101.htm I kinda like the idea of POR15, at least if I'm looking at a repair bill thats 1/4 the cost of the car itself.

yes, more or less. but if you go that rout, play with the por 15 first, its picky. the article states that it does not set up fast, be careful there, that is totally dependent on your environment. heat and more moisture will make it cure very fast, and once it is fully cured it is VERY hard to get a tooth on the stuff for paint to stick to. there is a table here, err on the side of caution, in texas, with it in the 90s, and not that humid i had it rock hard in what i feel like was under an hour!
http://qr.absolutecoatings.com/QR-assets/downloads/POR15/POR15-Description.pdf

por15 is great when used correctly. just dont put it anywhere you would like to ever remove it

naval jelly, and ospho are both phosphoric acid products which are like "metalready"
i think metal ready is zinc phosphate iirc. those should work in place, as the metalready is pricy.

i think por15 sells a small kit with all the stuff in it too.


if your car is relentlessly salted every year without being washed it will get bad.

if you properly prep that spot and fluid film it, and clean and fluid film the underside of the car before the weather gets cold, and clean it in the spring before it gets warm it would last over 5 years.

my rot box 91 also needed front control arms, brake proportioning valve, fuel return line, and fuel tank. but it probably saw salt every year of its life. some 240s rust in weird spots too, i feel like the 1990 ones had some qc issues, i have seen a weird pattern of rust start under paint not because of exposure, but probably prep. one spot is the front drivers side of the top of the hood.
they have some body rust in places others don't before they start in the normal spots....
anyway.



anyway, i like vote for the sheep grease, but yes por15 is a more permanent solution.

my 77 244 i completely took to bare metal and did everything by the book, welded in new panels etc, sprayed it in PPG dcc concept... it looks great, but i still have not got around to putting the harness and interior back in, and got it running again. when i have the time to do that, it ends up going elsewhere.
If i could do it again, i would have just cleaned the bad spots like i said, threw fluid film on it, and drove the f'ng thing.

this post paid for by fluid film
 
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Thank you for the in-depth post odin, it really shined some some on a what seemed like grim situation. Reading too many TB posts about rust is like a hypochondriac reading webmb :lol: .

Ideally, I think I would rather go the fluid film/por15 route (DONE RIGHT of course) instead of dumping $$ into having someone cut, weld, etc. I'll be graduating here in the next year and applying for grad schools, so money is pretty limited to put into a DD that logs 20K mi+ a year. I will most likely not get to it until until this May when I'd be able to take the car off the road for 2-3 days at a time to work on it. Though I'd like to start my research now and get pointed in the right direction so when the times comes, I can go in with a confident plan.

As for filling the hole in the well, would fiberglass or steel wool be the best bet and save the welding for the quarter panel itself? Luckily its covered by plastic trim and mud flaps so I'm not too concerned about looks right there.
 
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