After replacing my fender it's now time to try to salvage the door skin on my trusty 78 Camaro. It got slammed into by an errant motorist on a cell phone and dinged up the passenger side of the car including the quarter panel and a badly crumpled front fender.
I did not want to spend any money to buy a stud welder so I did the old tried and true method of drilling holes and pulling out the dents. A 4-1/2 foot long pipe, some hardware chain, tapcons and my spare tire as a pedastal for the bar and chain and out came the 4 foot long depression in my door.
This is what we did thirty years ago with a morgan knocker and then just filled the holes with filler. I am tempted to go back and weld these closed but there is enough depth left in the dents to allow a primer coat of duraglass before hitting it with some regular filler.
If it wasn't for the guard beam in the door I would have hammered this one out. I was not willing to put forth the effort to replace the skin or cut the door apart to fix. We would not have done it back then in the collision shop I worked at and I ain't doing it now.
I did not want to spend any money to buy a stud welder so I did the old tried and true method of drilling holes and pulling out the dents. A 4-1/2 foot long pipe, some hardware chain, tapcons and my spare tire as a pedastal for the bar and chain and out came the 4 foot long depression in my door.
This is what we did thirty years ago with a morgan knocker and then just filled the holes with filler. I am tempted to go back and weld these closed but there is enough depth left in the dents to allow a primer coat of duraglass before hitting it with some regular filler.
If it wasn't for the guard beam in the door I would have hammered this one out. I was not willing to put forth the effort to replace the skin or cut the door apart to fix. We would not have done it back then in the collision shop I worked at and I ain't doing it now.