Civic underbody rust repair
The Civic came to me needing new steel patches installed on both the driver’s and passenger’s sides underbody near the center and outside edge of the underbody.
The first thing I did after getting it into the welding shop, was to unhook the battery, always a good thing to do before welding on a vehicle or even welding on some conveyor systems. Anything that could have some kind of computer on it. The next thing is to get grinding on the rust. In my experience, the trick is to remove as much rust as possible while leaving enough material to weld on. it can be hard to determine at times and make the weld job take longer if material suddenly blows out from being too thin suddenly.
Once I was happy with the “weldable area” I had created I fabricated a patch to match closely from what I could say may have been the original shape. It is important to note customer intent here. I was not asked to replicate a factory finish but to get this car through one more inspection. That being said I wanted to make sure there was new metal where at least from what I could see used to be metal.
My welder is a Canaweld pulse 201-d, I did not feel like having a mental breakdown so I opted out of attempting this job using the welder stick setting, and instead set up TIG. I used Pure argon gas and as of now I can not remember the filler wire diameter but it wasn’t something crazy I wish I had the thinner stuff for this job but alas. As stated earlier I had some very solid areas to weld to, and others were paper thin, for most of the welding I had the welder set up at around 45 amps, and I set the welder as low as 20amps where the old base metal would burn away.
Something of note I thought myself clever at one point in frustration in dealing with the old metal. I have a pulse welder, let’s use that to keep it cool and run a solid pass. That turned out to be a terrible idea mainly for holding an overhead position under a car with little room (no lift for me) and timing the pulse was very straining so I stopped doing that.
Once I had the patches stitched in good I cleaned them off with acetone and primed. I have been trying out Tremclad as its oil-based I just feel like it might be a better-lasting paint, time will tell. At last, I like to use a coat of clear on whatever I do just for that little bit more protection on the paint.
