Cool Sheet Metal Repair Trick

My neighbor Keith taught me a cool trick to repair a tear at the edge of a panel. My fender had a notch where somebody got carried away with a grinder (not me!). The notch was about 2mm wide and maybe 7mm long. It was right at the edge of the rear fender half, right on top of the rolled bead... Sorry, I didn't take a picture of the original notch.



It's really hard to weld the edge of a panel, because the metal blows out when it gets molten. Keith's suggestion was to clamp a little piece of tin underneath the gap, and then start the weld bead on the new metal, moving towards the original tin. You can see that I bent a bead into the new piece to match the existing bead.

Worked great. This is pretty thin (24 gauge) sheet metal. After I made the weld, then I cut/ground away 90% of the new piece, and got an almost perfect repair...