How to Grind Away Rust in Car Restoration

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Doug. I work with twenty great guys in St. Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods and we are going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. Now, Alex is going to take what looks like good strong metal that has surface rust and he's using a small nematic grinder with a roll off pad on it. He's grinding away to see if the parent material is structurally sound. This doesn't look to us like it needs to be cut away. It might be real thin rust and if he grinds off the surface rust, we are hoping to have that piece strong enough to keep . The goal is to do as little invasive work as possible to keep the most of the original steelwork as possible, both for the structural integrity and for cost. The more car we have to repair and cut away, the more cost there is involved and we want to keep the repair as cost-effective as possible. And a couple whacks with the hammer and we find some more rust problems. We've exposed enough of this piece that we've condemned it as well. It's too weak to save, so we'll cut that out as well. And I guess we'll get to make three separate steel pieces here in order to make this repair. This is more work than the customer was expecting, so he'll have a phone call coming here in few minutes to authorize the further work. We use a cut off tool...this nematic cut off tool for this repair as opposed to the plasma cutter which you may have seen in other clips we've done of other repairs. Because the pieces being cut are so small, we want the cuts to be real clean. And it's too dangerous to have a plasma cutter in around a car that is fully assembled like this. We don't want to be blowing red hot metal into little cavities in the car. "