Rust work

So I live up in Canada, and it's winter now. This means salt on the roads. A terrible reality for a protege driver. The guy that I bought my car from did some bodywork on the hatch, in the spots common for rust, as well as on the rear wheel wells. Unfortunately, it has started to rust again in the rear wheel wells. Also I have noticed that all the doors (except for the rear passenger) are getting really rusty at the bottom too, but I don't know if you can do anything with that without getting a new door. The undercarriage of the car is not terribly rusty at all, and overall, the rest of the body and paint is pretty good. I love this car, and I want to fix the rust before it's too far gone but I have no freaking idea how. Also I bought the car with a massive dent on the rear passenger side. And a few other dents around. So my plan is to do some bodywork at some point this winter. I will include some pictures and if you guys could give me some suggestions on what all I would have to do to fix it that would be awesome.

Jfunk said:

So I live up in Canada, and it's winter now. This means salt on the roads. A terrible reality for a protege driver. The guy that I bought my car from did some bodywork on the hatch, in the spots common for rust, as well as on the rear wheel wells. Unfortunately, it has started to rust again in the rear wheel wells. Also I have noticed that all the doors (except for the rear passenger) are getting really rusty at the bottom too, but I don't know if you can do anything with that without getting a new door. The undercarriage of the car is not terribly rusty at all, and overall, the rest of the body and paint is pretty good. I love this car, and I want to fix the rust before it's too far gone but I have no freaking idea how. Also I bought the car with a massive dent on the rear passenger side. And a few other dents around. So my plan is to do some bodywork at some point this winter. I will include some pictures and if you guys could give me some suggestions on what all I would have to do to fix it that would be awesome.

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Hi, so as a fellow Canadian ( good day 'eh ) I feel your rust pain. Good news is it doesn't look as though your rust is super-bad yet. You maybe able to get away with spot fixing your rust with sanding it down and applying rust converter ( awesome product, turns rust into primer ) priming and painting, duplicolor makes Mazda colours in a rattle can and prime with a zinc based primer.

If the rust is worse than the photos suggest then you may need to install new wheel arches ( see photo ), I believe linuxracer has a sticky in the how-to section on welding ( Tig specifically ).

The wheel arch would give you a chance to pound out that dent on your driver's side, you may also be able to pull that dent out with suction cups, depends on if it's folded or not ( princess auto has kits for dent pulling, slide hammers with suction bases ).

Good luck fighting the rust !

Awesome thanks for the info. Good to know duplicolor makes our paint.

Jfunk said:

Awesome thanks for the info. Good to know duplicolor makes our paint.

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Napa can mix up some paint if you go in with your color code, it comes in a little jar with a sprayer that screws on.... Although duplicolor is probably a better deal.

Regardless of what you end up doing, take it in and get it under coated/rust proofed when you're done. You need to treat the backside of the rusty areas you worked on or it will rust through again from the back, probably within a year.

Go to a place that drills holes and uses wands to reach inside the frame and pillars.
I go to Krown here in Ontario,... Don't know if you've got them in Saskatchewan...
I spend $130 a year... Well worth the money.

The bottoms of my doors are rusty too but they haven't gotten worse in the 8 years I've had the car.

Apparently, there's a Krown location in Saskatoon and Swift Current.

Take a look under your drivers seat carpet...
Here's what mine looked like...
That's a hole through to the ground.



I scraped all the rust off and built up the area with 5 minute epoxy and fiberglass cloth.








Then I caked the area with a 50/50 mixture of grease and roofing tar and heated it up on the stove to make it spreadable.

I just can't get over how much rust you guys have to deal with up there!

Most of that doesn't look too bad, i would probably take a wire wheel to it and start grinding at a medium speed. use light pressure and it will take it down to bare steel pretty quickly so you can see what you've REALLY got to work with. Looks like mostly surface stuff, if so you can just add a bit of bondo to fill in the low spots and paint it.

I might also recommend having the lower sections sprayed with bedliner before you paint it. Lot of the mud trucks here do that and it's pretty much indestructable after that! Some kinds of the bedliner you can paint over the top, or they can come in a variety of different colors as well. May not match perfect but could be close!


As for the doors, don't think there's much you can do there but get some new ones from a scrap yard. You can get just the door skins but that's a considerable amount of welding and rolling to get them installed, and in the long run probably wouldn't be a lot cheaper than just getting a complete door from the scrap yard, bolt it in and swap your interior panel (and window if windows are tinted).

I agree completely wwith pcb on the dent. I would try suction cups, get some heavy duty ones. You'd be surprised at what you can pull out! It won't be perfect because it looks like there is some creasing there but i'd bet you can pull out 75% of it just by popping it hard with a suction cup. From there you can probably peen it out, but either way you'll have to use some bondo for the low spots and to smooth it out and repaint for it to be invisible.

i'm certainly no body man, i don't really have the patience lol. it's not "hard" to do body work, it just takes a lot of time and patience. it's very tedious work. if i had a big job i needed done right, i'd probably pay somebody lol. if it was my car, with as many miles as it has, I just go for functional