What's up guys, I decided to take this job on recently rather than submit my car to what would more than likely be the end of its life. I wanted to avoid having to buy a new car and take on a car payment and I didn't want to have to try and find a shop that would take this project on and pay them an absurd amount of money so... I decided to learn and do it myself.
My car is an 04 eblue, I've owned it for 4-5 years now. I bought it with 119k miles, a greddy type s BOV, mopar STS, mopar catback, mopar plug wires, stage 1 ecu, aftermarket clutch and a 3bar map. I'm now at nearly 184k, and outside of this issue and general maintenance this car has been a champion and had no problems for me. I have never owned a car that has managed to hit this mileage, let alone make it this long without having the motor completely shit on itself in some way. Not only that but I know that in 60k+ miles I have owned it I certainly haven't babied it, and judging by the fun mods that were already on it, the previous owners did not as well.
Having been in college I haven't really touched it besides maintenance, I was told when I picked the car it it had always been garaged, and visually everything including the engine bay were so clean and appeared to be well taken care of so I believed the person. Fast forward 5 years and I have discovered not only are the rockers rotting out but this was actually an issue well before I owned the car, and 1 of the 2 people that owned it before me did a shitty hack of a job trying to cover it up. Because I wasn't aware the cancer just spread and did some pretty heavy work from the inside out until the outer panels just crumbled and turned into holes exposing the insides.
As for myself, I have never welded before this, I have never done any sort of body/chassis work before this and by any professionals standards I'm certainly not qualified and absolutely crazy for taking this on. But like I said, I figured the alternative was the end of the cars life, and because I have a weird attachment to it I wanted to try and save it from its cancer.
A little about how I am approaching this job: I know the value of the car (and honestly most SRT4s unless they are low mileage and in amazing condition) is next to nothing, you can buy them for dirt on the dollar so I wanted to go about this as cheaply as possible. I bought a cheap welder and bending break from Harbor Freight as well as most of the wire, grinding and cutting wheels I have been using. The outer skins for both drivers and passengers sides I ordered off carid. The inner rocker panels I am fabricating myself with steel sheeting I picked up from the local hardware store. I have also picked up a bunch of rust reformer, self etching primer, seem sealer and all that good stuff.
If anyone is interested in a price breakdown on this job, I can do that and continually update it as I move along.
And now, I will go through my process (with pictures). Unfortunately I wasn't intending to post anything on here to begin with so I haven't really documented/taken many pictures but I will share what I have:
So this is after cutting away a bit of the outer skin revealing some of the damage to the inner panel underneath
I began by cutting away at the outer skin down the length of the car, I have left about an inch of metal below the holes where the side skirts mount in up top in order to give me plenty of metal to weld to when I have finished inside. Fortunately for me MOST of the damage has been contained to the bottoms of the panels, this goes for both the outer and inner. I just took a yard stick and a sharpie, marked a line the whole way down in order to cut as straight as possible.
(I don't have any shots of the entire length of the car, I will have to grab some tomorrow)
Once that cut above was made, I needed to remove the "existing" spot welds. The entire length of the pinch weld besides the very front and about 12 inches on the back was completely destroyed to the point that I could pry the rusted metal apart. So instead of drilling out the welds I just took the grinder to them, knocking away the rusted crap as well until I hit clean metal.
This is a shot from the area near the front behind the fender, the rust in this area probably ate of the most surface area, and I am going to have to take off the fender so that I can cut off the end of the existing outer skin because I want to salvage this piece as I do not believe the replacement skins I ordered include this bend to accommodate where they sit back behind the fender and this section most definitely needs to be entirely cut out and replaced on the inner rocker.
Luckily for me the last foot or so of the inner and the 5 or so inches of the outer skin are in good shape, so I have left that area alone.
Once I had the existing metal mostly cleaned up and void of rust I began figuring out the measurements of the existing inner rockers and making a cardboard template to know what angles I needed to bend the metal to. Luckily these panels in our cars are pretty simple in shape.
Initial fitment of these panels are pretty good, they need a little tweaking and some trimming near the pinch weld area. The angled section will be cut in half for most of these since only one area has significant damage further up the panel.
The new panel replacements I am fabricating are being made from 3 6x16-18 inch (I forget the exact length) sheets of 22ga. This is mostly because 22ga is what was readily available to me, but I have also read online that newer cars have inner rockers made with 20-22ga sheet metal, the replacement outer skins I ordered are made with 18ga sheet metal. Welding this is going to be fun, but I did some practice prior to starting. By practice I mean teaching myself how to weld by welding sheets of 22ga sheet metal... so I killed 2 birds with 1 stone there.
This is where I am at after a couple days into the work. I hope to be able to get the last bit of the rust removed tomorrow, and have everything cleaned up and primered inside to be able to start welding and sealing.
If anyone has any questions, or any suggestions let me know. I figured this would be an interesting thing to post as I couldn't find anything on anyone doing this kind of job on our cars.
