Finishing the lower panel, nmow with drain holes! Outer side panel welded and painted, not that I made the picture before I drilled the drain holes and holes for the side trim. Obviously paint it on the inside as wheel since all the water is going there from the window. What remained was to weld the outside panel, paint it, make drain holes and side trim fastener holes. Needed to recreate the corner there as well, a bit tricky, but very satisfied with the result. I got access through the other hole in channel to paint it, there is a large rubber plug one can open. Lower panel before welding, huge holeĪfter cutting the inner panel and welding in a new one it looked like this. The hole left was huge, all that lower panel had top be cut off and even the inner panel is rusted out and needed to be removed. All panels removed including window mechanism Beyond the inner panelĭo you see that hole behind the seat belt puller? Obviously there was no hole before, no drains remember… But after removing the the rusted metal a huge hole was left, maybe a bit too much? To get access to the inside I had to remove even the window mechanism. Lets get to work, start tearing those inner panels off, hopefully without damaging them and breaking clips. The big part was removing the panels in the interior and working in tight areas. Thankfully the welding was quite easy since it involved straight large panels. Idiots… The result are massive amount of rust in this area, both on the inner canal panel and the outer body panel. However here there were no such thing like on the right side. This is fine since the water can escape through drains through the lower panel. Especially when the windows are lowered when they are wet they drag lots of water into the panels. The outer car window seals are never completely rainproof since the windows are made to be lowered. How do i know that? The lower panel had no water drain holes! How is this possible to be so sloppy when fixing a repair? They must have known it would start rusting immediately when the water has nowhere to go every time it rains. I realized that the car have had a small repair on the lower section under the left side rear quarter window due to a parking ding or something in the past.

Mercedes w123 body panels