Tip for making small panel patches

[scherp69]

I know there are lots of great fabricators and body guys on this site, none of which would ever need any advice from a guy like me, but I thought I would share a tip a discovered today,all because I was lazy the other day.

This is for anyone who had a hole in a panel that they needed to fill in with more sheet metal. I'm sure a lot of us have sat there cutting and testing, cutting and testing until finally the filler piece is the right size. Sometimes it may take several attempts, but eventually we make it. Today I was doing some more work on smoothing my firewall now that I now I will be using a drive by wire throttle. I cut out the area I wanted to smooth and started looking at the hole I had to fill trying to figure out the best way to make a template. I happened to look over on the floor and saw a roll of masking tape that I was too lazy to pick up the other day and it gave me this idea.

I thought of taking pics after I had the tape on, but you'll get the point.

The area I wanted to fill in was the pedal holes to the left of the steering column hole.



Once you have the hole cut, cover the entire hole with masking tape.



I used an exacto knife to cut along the sides of the hole



I then stuck the newly cut piece of tape to some sheet metal giving me my template



If you cut it along the side of the tape, it will be the about the same size of the hole. Since I wanted to butt weld it, I cut a little smaller than the tape



Take the tape off and you have your patch



Tack it into place. The nice thing about trimming a bit smaller than the tape was it left me nice gap to fill in with weld



Finish your welding



And finally after some clean up

[67rstbkt]

Nice tip

[Mrfixit]

Nice tip. In addition to what you've shown, I've run into some smaller holes that had some irregularities that make it too difficult to cut the tape as you did. What I did to solve this was to overlay the tape then rub it with my dirty glove. This leave an outline on the tape of the hole underneath. I then remove the whole piece of tape and transfer it to the sheet metal.

The method can work in reverse, too. I needed to make some cuts in a door skin for my new handles so I used tape to trace the outline from the donor vehicle then I transfered it to poster board. That gave me a stencil that I could use on both door skins.

I love masking tape!!!