In this episode of Performance Car Refurb
we take a look at what's involved for the rust repairs.
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In performance car refurb,
we follow two fourth year apprentices
as they learn collision repair tips
as they refurbish a Nissan R32 Skyline GTR -
A hero and modern classic of the performance car world.
This R32 will soon have the show to match its go.
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So for a car of this era -
an early 90's car,
to find as little rust as we did
was such a surprise if I'm honest.
A little bit of rust in the rear quarter.
There was a little bit of surface rust
around the front and rear window apertures
which would have been from a previous work,
but other than that, there wasn't a huge amount
of surface rust really.
As far as structural rust, nothing.
So seals are all good.
The only real rust repair that was needed
to be just two small patches in the bottoms
of the rear wheelarches was big surprise.
Anything is repairable,
it just depends on how much time you have.
Yeah, there's definitely different levels
that you can work to.
For what we wanted to achieve
and what the purpose of the car is for,
we decided to do a rough patch
cutting it out, clean it all up properly.
We had various considerations,
one being time,
the repair area was quite difficult.
We had considerations where there were
tabs for trims to to fit,
and we didn't want to lose any reference points
for those trims.
The repair we decided to do
was a little bit unconventional,
like a full restoration would have either
made up a complete new lower quarters
or would have just replaced the quarter in its entirety.
The hole that we were replacing was very small
and so we cut back just as far as we were comfortable with
as far as we knew, we've got rid of all the rock that was there,
and we're not going to have any issues in the future.
It is really handy to have a good range of tools
out there in the shop like that.
It was so important to get that area clean
and so by having the belt sanders
along with their Cubitron™,
were able to prep the area properly,
which is so important especially in rust repairs,
and so yeah you're having high quality tooling like that
again it's a speed, it's a quality thing,
it's a confidence thing.
When you're going into it with good tooling,
you know that you're going to be able to create
the repair that you want to.
The 3M tooling used -
We chose the Cubitron™ II abrasives.
File belts, the roloc discs,
and the sanding pads.
We also use some 3M™ Clean and Strip
just to make sure that everything was
perfectly clean, ready for welding.
And we use the 3M body man range of tools
so the file belt machine,
the pistol grips and the cut off wheel
will again with the Cubitron™ II cut off discs.
And those just allowed us to refine the surface perfectly, to be honest
and the efficiency of Cubitron™ II
just meant that we were so much quicker
in carrying out the repairs
then we would have been otherwise.
Often when you're dealing with that sort of thing,
you would be really careful with key points like grommet inserts,
bodylines even can be affected by it
because of the heat transfer out of the welder.
So he designed a patch that avoided
the inserts for the grommets
so we didn't have to shape up
difficult designs like a square hole,
and then we avoided body lines
and we ran it down on an angle that the heat distortion
didn't affect the panel too much.
So by doing that and having him highlight that straight away,
we were able to get that process moving.
Doing the rust repair was...
it probably turned out better than I thought it would.
Having people like James over my shoulder
and Tim guiding me through that -
Little things like we avoided the grommet insert.
Doing stuff like that we were able to create
a really pretty good quality finish by the end of it.
So Cameron, he's a gun.
He did pretty much do the entirety of the rust repairs.
We made sure he was comfortable
with doing it and he was.
So Tim and I gave gave Cameron
some pointers, gave him some some advice,
helped him out with shaping the panels.
He welded them in, ground them flush
and they they needed very little filler to refine the surface.
Ready for highfill so he did a great job.
Our next episode of Performance Car Refurb looks at
working with and repairing carbon fiber and aluminium.
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