STEP-BY-STEP PICS: Rust repair on NCP13 rockers/sills, and on almost everything else

[praivo]

The floor pan on the driver's side was practically gone:





Yes, that's the carpet showing through after I removed the drain plug and pulled a bunch of rust off with it…

Surprisingly, the other side was fine with very little rust (compared to this, at least). That's good. I've talked to a guy who's had to replace BOTH sides…

I'm missing a few pics here. Basically, what I did was cut the whole floor pan out (while being careful not to damage anything else that doesn't need replacing), wire-brush the rest, and make a new pan out of 1mm steel (initially wanted to try 1.5mm, but it would have been too hard to bend at this size). The new pan was welded in place, the welds and all the cleaned metal were treated with rust converter and painted with zinc paint, and then rust converter again, just to be sure.







This was then sealed and sprayed with rubberized undercoating for some mechanical protection.



If you're wondering what the hell are those raised spots, they're plug weld that I made before I noticed that the new pan didn't fit as well as intended and ended up too high above the rail. I don't have a spot weld drill bit and they were too thick to drill out with a regular bit, so I decided to cut a small square around each weld to free the pan, get the pan to fit right, and weld those little squares back to the rest of the pan. They're barely noticeable even now what I'm driving the car without the carpet, so with the carpet in place they shouldn't be noticeable at all.

[justanotherdrunk]

an A for effort!

[praivo]

...and F for form! :-D

[06YarisRS]

Wow! A lot of work. Looks great! I use floor liners in all my cars to avoid rotten floor pans. Once that carpet gets wet, it's a long time drying out. Driver's side rotting out and passenger side not makes sense as likely less water being soaked into the carpets.

[praivo]

I'm now actually thinking about just not using the carpet at all, at least for the winter. I'd just paint the floor black (which I'm going to do anyway) and then I'd put truck bed liner on it so to prevent damage from shoes, luggage, etc.

[praivo]

Today, I wanted to repair a hole in the subframe that I found earlier. However, cleaning it with a wire brush revealed multiple other holes which, while smaller, would still be a real pain to fix and the result still probably wouldn't be that great.



I have therefore decided to replace the subframe completely. I've found one for a fairly low price and in a far better condition and will order it soon. Before that, however, I want to drive the car for a bit and see how much oil it burns. If it turns out to burn too much I want that to be before I put any more money into this thing - the head gasket seems fine, so it would be either bad valve seals or piston rings, neither of which would probably be worth replacing.

With the left front wheel off I also decided to look at the wheel well. Yep, of course that's rusted too...





I'm not going to fix this now, either. The strut will need to come out to give me access to what's behind it, requiring an alignment afterwards, which, of course, costs money. And since the subframe needs to be replaced (if the engine turns out not to burn too much oil) I'm going to then take care of this at the same time so that I only need to get the alignment once.

[praivo]

I haven't posted for a while, but I have been working on the car, so here's a quick update:

I have repaired multiple holes in the RR wheel well. I cut all the damaged metal out and used rust converter (phosphoric acid) on the remaining surface rust. Then I made a patch bigger than the hole, welded it on and gave it one coat of the Zn/Al primer on the top and the asphalt undercoating on the bottom. This was then sealed from both sides and painted again. The last step were two coats of black paint (which claims to prevent rust, but I don't really trust it, and zinc does it better anyway).

Tomorrow I'll sand and paint the rest and spray a bit more oil into the rocker panel. After that I should finally be able to put the plastic trim panels back on to prevent thing from falling into them and myself from hearing every pebble that hits the wheel well.

So here's the top...







...and the bottom:






As you can see, I didn't really manage to get the patch right. But since the shape of the wheel well in this area would make making a nice patch a PITA and I made it with a only few hours of daylight left to weld it in before having to leave the next morning I decided to leave it like that and will the rest with fiberglass filler. I had already cleaned it and applied rust converter beforehand so I'm not really worried about the rust coming back.

The next two photos were taken today, 200 km after I did this, that's why it's dirty.




(I didn't get the angle right, I'll take a better photo tomorrow).

[praivo]

The next step was the spare wheel well, which used to have two rather large holes in it (large enough for tools to fall through them!). I had already welded one before, so there was only one left at this point. I didn't bother trying to replicate the original shape, I just wanted to get rid of the hole. If I get lucky enough, the whole section of the floor will be replaced with a good one next year, along with the middle section (above the fuel tank) and, hopefully, the left wheel well.



This was done on Monday, together with a part of the right wheel well. I drove the car on Tuesday morning and it got noticeably quieter inside

There's now only one thing left to repair on the rear half of the car, and it's this hole in the inner layer of the rear quarter panel.



As you can see, someone's been here before - and whoever that was probably also put silicone, or whatever it was, along the edge, which obviously trapped water and caused everything it covered to rust.

Here's the outside that I'm going to need to cut out to access the inside and get all the rust out:




That little crack/gap definitely shouldn't be there. Might be why the car has been repainted (and quite badly at that).

Here's a fun fact: So far I've used about 2 m^2 (!) of the 1mm sheet metal (2/3 of the 1.5×2-m piece I bought in June). I'll probably need to buy more for the front of the rockers. I've also used about 30 kg of CO2 for the MIG welder and over 2.5 kg of wire. And while I've stopped counting the time spent on the car a long time ago, I'd guess at least 150-180 hours now (mainly because this is my very first time doing most of these things and I'm doing everything by myself with no help from anyone else).