Tried a cheap stud welder on a rusty quarter panel and it pulled nothing but the paint off

I picked up one of those $90 stud welders online thinking it'd save me time on this rusty 2002 F-150 quarter panel I'm fixing up in my garage in Toledo. The first three welds just popped right off and took a chunk of paint with them, leaving the actual dent untouched. Has anyone else had luck with the cheaper kits or do I really need to drop $300 on a better one?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivan7744d ago

That's a good point about the ground, I didn't even think to check mine. My ground clamp is sitting on a painted section of the frame rail, so that might be the whole problem right there. But how do you get a good solid ground on a rusty panel without grinding the clamp into the metal so hard you mess up the paint around the area you're trying to fix? I feel like you end up swapping one problem for another if you have to grind through rust to get a good connection.

allen.iris4d ago

Everybody's blaming the welder but nobody's talking about the prep work, which is what actually gets you stuck. That cheap stud welder might be fine for clean metal, but rust is a whole different animal. You gotta grind down to bare steel, hit it with a flap disc, then clean it with acetone before you even think about welding. If you're trying to weld through rust or paint, it doesn't matter if you spent $90 or $900, it's gonna pop off every time. Also check your ground clamp connection, make sure it's biting into clean metal too. I ran into the exact same problem on my first go and it turned out my ground was sitting on painted frame rail. Once I fixed that, the cheap welder worked fine for what it is. It's not a professional tool but it'll get the job done if you give it clean metal to work with.