Hi everyone, I recently bought a cherokee, it's a 91 briarwood, I love it! It has some rust on the body, towards the bottoms. Is there any way I can remove this without cutting it? And the hood paint it peeling/fading, just some general advice would be great. I'm 16 and want to know the best options before I jump into doing something that could mess up my rig. Thank you in advance! Happy mudding!

 

Hi, and welcome. There's a couple different ways you could approach it without having to specifically cut out pieces of the body. unfortunately, a lot of those are just bandages and don't necessary fix the problem overall.

Personally I like to use a grinder and grind off the major rust sections, work my way until ~1 inch outside of the major rust areas. At this point, if it was just surface rust, you can put a light coating of Bondo over it and sand it smooth, paint it. It won't look the best but the rust will be a little more under control.

If it's rusted through the metal and there is more of a hole, you're in for a lot more work. You can grind off outer portions of the rust and then fiberglass mesh + bondo it, or even weld in a new body panel section. If you're not worried so much about the paint being the same color down on the lower portions of the doors and the rockers, you can also consider truck bed liner (Like Monstaliner, rhino, etc) which I tend to like the look of.

Everyone has their own preferred methods of dealing with rust, so mine might not be the most popular. Depends on how bad it is, how good you want it to look, and how long you want to keep the rust at bay until you need to treat it again.

 

Don't use anything besides metal if it has holes ... Patch the holes/rust and do it right the first time before you have to do it a second or third time.

 

These should be a bondo fix right?

 

Thank you! I don't think it will need to be welded, I'm not sure though, I posted some pictures in the thread. I'm thinking it should be a sand/bondo type fix

 

take a DA to that and get it down to bare metal... That's the only way to see what you have, keep in mind metal tends to rust from the inside out.

 

Yeah when it isn't raning out and when I don't have school/work I'm going to lift up the carpets and see what's going on underneath just to be sure, other than that it's ok, it jumps a little when driven, might be a pinched fuel line right? Clogged filter?

 

could also be a fuel pump.. More description is needed to tell.. I can't physically look at it

 

Like said you need to sand the rust down to bare metal to see how deep it is.Any holes should only be filled with metal,Using bondo as a hole filler it will just pop loose over time and back to square one.

 

Sand, bondo, and then bedliner the bottoms.

 

I would pull off the door panels and look at the inside of the doors,If they rusted from the inside out might be cheaper just to replace the doors.

 

Or just take them off

 

Rust Mort. Google it.

 

i would use an 80 grit sanding disc on a grinder, take it down to bare metal then use glazing putty and sand smooth. prime and paint, then sand and cover with rubberized undercoating or bedliner of choice.


when the edges get dull from sanding, i use a pair of tin snips and just cut the dull, shiny edge off sort of in an octagon shape.
don't hold the disc flat, use the edge.


you have to remove all the rust or it will just bubble again later.

 

Rust Mort will do that after your sanding.