To start things off I sanded down the mess inside the rear portion of the driver’s side quarter panel, it was irritating me.
With it sanded down to metal it became clear that the lower portion of the quarter panel had been replaced in the past, you can see the horizontal line of stitch welds across the lower third of the picture. I’ll need to do much the same repair again and I’ll need to make sure to cut above the previous weld line when I do so.
After spraying a rust neutralizer on the panel and letting it work overnight I laid down self-etching primer to protect the metal.
Next I crawled underneath the rear driver’s side wheel well where a couple problems had been uncovered while I was removing the trunk floor. My thinking was that I needed to address the issues in the wheel housing while the trunk was still removed as it allowed for much easier access to the back side of these panels. Plus the hidden nature of this area seemed to lend itself well to my first attempts at making patches.
The easy part was cutting the offending metal out of the car.
I used the pieces that I had just cut out as templates and traced their shapes on to fresh stock.
As I learned from many YouTube videos – cut big and work your way down to the desired shape.
Eventually I got the piece close enough to start test fitting and with a few last modifications I was happy with the way it was fitting. I wasn’t worried about the “nose” sticking out further than the remaining tab, that could be easily cut down once it was welded in place.
Satisfied with the patch, it was time to stitch weld it in place.
It wasn’t perfect but there was a fair amount of weld penetration through the back. I’m still figuring out the welder and becoming more comfortable with the process of stitch welding, hopefully I’ll continue to improve with time.
The final step for the patch (for the moment) was to grind the welds mostly flat. I planned to come back through later and get them truly flush.
With the smaller patch done I moved on to the larger patch along the flange that connects back to the trunk floor, following the same process as before.
An hour or two later I had the patch welded in place. The penetration wasn’t quite as good on this one so I ended up stitch welding the inside and then coming around to the back to stitch weld that side as well. More confidence in having a solid weld at the cost of needing to spend more time grinding. Again I planned on getting things as flush as possible at a later date, my goal was to just get the welds knocked down to make sure there weren’t any obvious issues.
I took this picture while sitting in the same wheel well looking back towards the rear of the car. Pictured is the wheel housing where it meets the bottom of the rear section of the quarter panel. When I put a light behind the panel it became obvious how much damage there was so I set about removing it too.
Since it was a larger piece with a more complicated shape I made sure to trace out a new piece of metal notably larger than the original to give me room to work with.
After an hour or two of shaping the metal largely by hand here’s how the patch was shaping up.
After four hours of forming the panel I was finally happy with the way it was looking and fitting in the car. In the following pictures I have it mocked up and held in place with a magnet.
Final comparison between the old section and the new patch, I was pretty happy with how it turned out.
Unfortunately I couldn’t immediately weld it into place because the back side of the patch would be all but inaccessible at that point so I needed to make sure it was protected first. I also knew that I still needed to replace the lower rear portion of the quarter panel and that cutting it out would be easier without this piece in place.
Finishing the more complicated patch left me feel pretty accomplished, even if it did take all day. Attacking the lower rear section of the quarter panel seemed like a logical next step, once I was done with that I should be able to finally make use of the patch I had constructed.