With the direction of going clean and smooth on my car I decided I wanted to shave my finger hole off the gas door lid.
This is the direction I took.
Start with a fresh lid
Cut out the finger hole..making sure to keep the heat down with compressed air.
Cut a piece of metal roughly the right size...I rolled my edge to make a lip
Using a grinder make it fit as perfect as you can..Better the fit the easier it is going to be to weld!
Tack the filler panel in. For the sake of not warping the metal cool with air between welds.
Then I finished welding it up. One tack at a time and cooling. Then ground it down with a flap wheel. Again cooling with air.
Then use some long strand fiberglass filler.
After that's smoothed out use some lightweight filler
Sand, primer fill and paint.
Before
After
*** I am by no means a professional...more like a weekend warrior but do to do things the right way.
***Yes the color is slightly off. Car was painted..good enough for now and will be perfect once I fix the cancer below the door.
I like ..... I should get some practice seeing as im replacing my rocker panel over winter.
Really easy first project to start on.
Took me maybe 5 hours on my first try.....
Second try was maybe 4 hours..
Yah so funny story....I shaved it all up and used the lid off my sunfire I was about to wreck...Cavs and fires have different gas doors!! Not off by much but enough not to fit. So I had to do it a second time lol.
Looks good but personally if I'm going to go through the trouble I'm shaving the gas door all together.
Copter wrote:Looks good but personally if I'm going to go through the trouble I'm shaving the gas door all together.
I may do that in the future but it was a $30 mod for cost of the lid, and paint, and a afternoon of time if that. Most my time was spent waiting for the paint to dry.
For now while the car is a dd ill have the fill outside the car.
I hope mine can look that good when I get around to doing it, good job.
only if i had a spare gas door
Make me one, I'm too lazy
Looks good man, Nice how to also
dxdean3 wrote:only if i had a spare gas door
I think I paid $5.99 at the local pick and pull.
Looks ok, but now you can open the door easy. Maybe if it was on a spring with magnets holding it close it would be ok.
Need to fix the bubbles/rust at the bottem of the fender now.
FU Tuning
No Longer Screaming wrote:Looks ok, but now you can open the door easy. Maybe if it was on a spring with magnets holding it close it would be ok.
Need to fix the bubbles/rust at the bottem of the fender now.
Bubbles will be fixed come spring time.
The opening is not that bad. Just set the latch in a way that it holds it closed an opens fairly easily. Give it a push on the hinge side and it pops open. I agree though that a latch release system would be better, but for the 2 times a month I need to fill up ill deal with it.
No Longer Screaming wrote:Looks ok, but now you can open the door easy. Maybe if it was on a spring with magnets holding it close it would be ok.
Need to fix the bubbles/rust at the bottem of the fender now.
you stole my entire thought process! LOL
I did something similar but, I was fortunate to find a Toyota Cavalier door, this would be a great idea to make the doors. The mechanism for the gas door to open on the Toyota is similar to our own open and release button well in design. I used the cable from the trunk release and ran it all the way to the gas door. Heres the link on how I did my door.
Your text to link here...
and here is the link on the differences on the gas door. maybe this will help on the mechanism.
Your text to link here...
wondered how long it was going to take you to reply to this lol...
