Ep9 Welded Door Patch Panels

Watch me weld inner and outer patch panels into my badly rusted passenger side door.
Transcript:
So what I have here is my passenger side door, which I’ve had to cut a large portion of the bottom out. Which, as you can see here on the outer panel, it was very rusty.
Along this out panel edge, I allowed the edge to have a flange. That way once I bring my already fitted replacement piece for the outer panel against this, and I’m ready to weld, I’m just gonna plug weld against the flange. That way I’ll get a lot less blow-throughs and I’ll create a cleaner edge.
With this inner panel, I’ve already had to cut out a lot already, but I do need to cut out more because I left this corner here for aligning the outer panel. But I’ll be ready to cut this out here in a minute, as you’ll see.
This hinge, it was rusty, but not rusty enough where I couldn’t save it. So I went ahead and sandblasted it and put some weld-through primer on it, that way I didn’t have to worry about it rusting until I was ready to work on it.
So now I’m gonna go ahead and cut that off and show you how to plug weld.
Let me show you why I had to leave that corner in. This inner panel fits in this outer panel along the bottom edge, and once I’m finished, I’m gonna have to spot weld along this line. And so, if I don’t actually know where this inner panel piece goes, I’ll be a little stuck once I try and put everything together. But since I had the old corner in, I could fit this outer panel right in the right area, and that way, once I actually weld this in, I can weld this in, knowing that it won’t have a problem.
The first step to plug welding is to create a flange, which I’ve already done as you can see here. You create the flange using this air powered hydraulic air punch slash flange tool. On this side right here is the flanging part, which you would just put up against your edge and press the button, and it’ll flange your corner. Then on the other side, which is the next step, is a hole punch, which I’m going to put every two inches along here.
On my welds, I want to clean off the area where I am going to be welding, that way I get a cleaner weld. And even though this is weld-through primer, I don’t trust it all that much, so I’m just gonna clean it off anyway.
First I’m gonna tack the corners here, and then I’m gonna start welding my plugs, going around the circle, then going in to fill it in.
Here is a plug-weld, which is near completely perfect. It’s a little bit longer than it needs to be because I had a slight slip of the hand, but it’s near perfect. And once I’m done doing all my plug welds, I’m gonna come back to this corner and do some butt-welding.
When welding sheet metal, you always want to weld to the middle of your sheet. So I’m going to plug weld here, then here, then here, and then I’m going to go into the middle of those sections. And if you’ll also notice, I have a clamp right next to the plug weld I’m going to be doing first. That way the metal will be right up next to each other, and I know that there’ll be no gap.
For the corners, I’m going to need to butt-weld, and so since I know that these won’t warp as easily, I can do a continuous weld in a spiral type of motion all the way until my flange starts.
There’s a little bit of blow-through, so I’m gonna let that cool down and go to the other edge. I blew through again. Since I had a little blow-through, I lowered my arc voltage, that way I won’t get as much heat for the blow-through.
My butt-welds don’t look absolutely perfect all the way around, but they’ll do. However, my plug-welds look really nice, and I’ll show you a trick to how you can tell that they really do look nice by flipping over this door. If you look at the back side of my plug-welds, you can see that the welds went all the way through both pieces of metal. That’s how you know that you really have a good weld.
I made marks to where I cut my original inner panel out, but I’m not gonna cut along that line. I’m gonna cut about an eighth of an inch out and test fit it, and then I’m gonna keep grinding down that edge until I get the perfect fit.
This inner door patch has taken several hours to fit, and remember kids, it’s very important to get the perfect fit. That way it makes the welding a lot easier.
I’m gonna tack the inner panel in place before I do my final welds.
You’ll notice that I blew through because my gap was a little bigger there, so I’m gonna go ahead and grow a bubble, and then use that bubble to fill the blow-through.
Now I’m gonna do all the plug welds on the bottom and the sides, and just like before, I’m gonna start in the middle, then split the difference.
And I just welded to my pliers!
Whoa! Oh, Oh that’s not good!