Firstgens.com

  This is what I started with.

The air powered cut off wheel made short work of removal. I traced the cut out piece onto a piece of sheet and cut it out as well. 3 out of 4 sides fit well. Not good enough. Panel fit is extremely important on a butt weld, a 1/8" gap is way too much. You will simply burn holes in your project as I learned on the floor. I cut a larger piece and slowly ground, sanded and trimmed until I had what I though was a pretty good fit. I used a welding magnet to hold the piece in place and started tacking where the fit was best after cleaning the surrounding steel down to bare metal.Then kept moving the magnet and tacking in different spots, using the air gun from my compressor to cool each tack until the piece was tacked in place. The oily nasty undercoating on the bottom of the tunnel would smoke and smolder with every tack. I wasn't about to scrape it all off, this is a driver not a show car.

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 Now that the piece was tacked in, I proceeded to add tacks, moving from side to side & end to end, still using the air gun after each tack. Finally ending up with this.

It looks worse than it was, but definately not magazine quality work. I'm still not that accurate with the tacks, sometimes I missed the seam completely. Next time I'll make sure I have better lighting in place. I added a few more tacks and then ground it down. After grinding I crawled under the car and could see some pinholes, especially on the right side where the gap was too large. A 1/16 or less seems to be ideal. Take your time fitting and don't hurry. It will save extra work later. I did not have any seam sealer and this will be hidden, so I mixed up some JB Weld and went over all of the welding seams figuring it would fill the pinholes and add strength.

 It seems to be plenty strong and I'll find out when I mount the shifter down the road. In summary pick an easily accessible panel for your first project. Clean the metal as well as possible. Take your time with the fit, close will not work.

 This is not meant to be an experts welding series, but more of a chronical of my learning process, warts and all. Hopefull helping some of you to avoid my mistakes and learn from my progress. As always feel free to comment in the forum.

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