My door skin on my Model A coupe has rust holes along the outside from the bottom up about four inches. The rest of the door is in decent shape. Is it better to replace the skin all the way up to the belt line or should I just get the lower patch panel? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
As long as the lower patch is going to be welded to good solid metal there is no reason to do the whole skin.
If you see rust holes 4 inches up on the door you need to check it real good before buying a patch panel. I would bet once you start working on it you will find the metal thin at the edges a bit higher than that. How high is the patch panel? 6 inches? It is gonna be close. Usually when I try to do this I find out I needed another 1/4 of an inch.
Good advice so far, can you get a look inside and see how high the rust goes? You need to cut back to sound metal.
There is nothing better than new sheetmetal , I would Skin it, ( my opinion ) makes cleaning and prepping the inner door shell easy too
I think instead of taking a chance on it I am just gonna go ahead and replace the whole skin. Thanks so much for the help.
make sure you get the patches with compound curve... if you buy the cheapies, their skin portion will be flat... look deeper for the right panels... may be called concourse ?
Looks like your going to replace the whole skin but rule of thumb for me was what ever rust you can see before cutting it out figure about twice that.
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