I hope I don't look stupid asking this. I have an upper cowl panel that I took off my car to repair the lower cowl. I had what appeared to be surface rust on it. I treated it with OSPHO and painted the back side with rust bullet. After I welded it back onto the car I noticed that I have small pinholes In the valley where the windshield gasket goes on the drivers side. I don't know of anyone who makes a good replacement cowl and I am no metal fabricator. Is it OK to fill these pinholes with lead? I wouldn't use body filler but the lead seems to make some sense.
Is this a hidden area? If it is, you could simply apply a urethane seam sealer over it. This is how I see it, cars have seams all over them. In many GM cars from the sixties for instance there is a seam, a large gap at each corner. This seam is filled with a seam sealer, it isn't welded up, it is filled with a seam sealer. Now, mind you, it wasn't the best seam sealer and it some times failed. But we are talking about a crappy seam sealer (compared to todays) over a very large seam in a car that spent decades out side.
With todays urethane sealers and epoxy primers, it is going to out last us all.
Leading, sure, or replace it by welding in a new piece of metal. It depends on what your expectations are.
You didn't say what kind of car it is that you are working on, but I will try to answer anyway.
There are 2 issues I can see with trying to use lead.
The products that you have already applied MAY react from the heat, and also effect the adhesion of the lead. Since I do not believe in using those products, I don't have any first hand knowledge on what they will do to the process.
The other concern I would have is that the process for applying lead involves applying materials that will likely cause corrosion, atleast from the back side, where you cannot see it.
Either way, short of cutting out the rust, it is likely going to come back.
The car is a 65 dodge coronet convertible. I think that I misspoke on my original post. The holes are not from the rust. They are from the welding that I had to do. I used a spot weld cutter to gety the cowl off. The metal in the bends is thin and the old rust just made the metal thinner. I was having a problem with burning holes in the metal with the welder. It seems like the more I try to weld the worse the problem gets.
Not knowing your welding skill level, the problems could be from too much heat, too high a wire speed, too low of wire speed, just simply staying in one spot too long and on and on. Perfectly good sheet metal with no rust can be difficult to weld, let alone if it is thinned by rust. So you could have severely damaged metal that no one could weld to, or you lack in skills. It is hard to say.
"Tapping" the trigger to build up metal so you have something to weld to is a common fix for this problem. It is soooooo hard to say what to do not seeing it first hand. If one of us were there we may have a totally different suggestion than here over the monitor without even a picture. Not saying a picture would help much. But if you could take the picture, one from a distance way showing the spot marked, and then another real close up to see the metal.
Where you are welding, are you "plug welding" where you are welding the hole that you drilled back up? Is it the metal on top, or the metal under that is blowing through?
One common mistake is to direct the weld to the top metal, weld more on the underlying metal then once the weld is built up a little, and is still hot and molten WHILE you have the trigger pulled, move over to "grab" the top metal around the hold.
One thing just hit me, if you have some "rust magic" product on there, that could be a lot of the problem. Some rust products like Picklex are great and can be welded right thru. Others like POR are a nightmare. I don't know exactly what you did. CLEAN METAL is the first and formost need when welding.
Here is a thread on the subject with a link to a short article on the basics of welding that may be of help. It is written for people just as yourself. (click here)
I don't think the "rust magic" is the issue in my case. I masked off the areas to be welded before spraying the rust bullet on it. After the rust bullet dried, I unmasked the areas to be welded and sparayed a weld through primer in those areas. I know that alot of the issue is my skill level as a welder. I am new to it and am using a low end Lincoln gasless welder. It's one of those things where I know the more I dick with it the worse it could be. I reeeeeeeeeeeally don't want to pull the upper cowl again. It was hard enough to get the factory spot welds loose, much less my re-welds.
gassless on sheet metal is a losing battle, on the lead question, i personally love doing leadwork but the key is having clean metal. you stated that you sprayed on weld through primer first, therefore you dont have clean metal to work with so forget the lead i would use the metal to metal as rag to bird suggested it is a great product that I have used many times, the key with it is to make sure you first mix it first in the can really well and then mix it really well after you get it on your mixing board. The resins and metal tend to seperate when left sitting so mixing it is key!! :thumbup: I hope this helps you!
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