My Mk1 failed MOT today. Reason extensive corrosion underneath.
I checked quickly an seen that the 2 rear jack points seem to have carved in, so yes he is right. He recommends scrap, but as you can probably tell I like my car so am reluctant to accept defeat after so many good experience with my car.

So do you guys think that the underside of the mk1 can be welded easily? and is this a common think to do to mk1's.

anything is fixable fella... can you weld or do you know someone that will do ti free or for mates rates? Its pretty much labour charges you are looking at and if its bad then its alot of hours work.

My fiat had a jacking point repaired for the MOT last year (just before i bought it) and the chap said it wasn't really bad money wise, but it was one small patch. You really need to get someone who can fix it to assess it and come up with a number before you can decide.

dumbledore said:

My Mk1 failed MOT today. Reason extensive corrosion underneath.
I checked quickly an seen that the 2 rear jack points seem to have carved in, so yes he is right. He recommends scrap, but as you can probably tell I like my car so am reluctant to accept defeat after so many good experience with my car.

So do you guys think that the underside of the mk1 can be welded easily? and is this a common think to do to mk1's.

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pic

I showed to someone today and he told me that its lots of work. I'll be looking at 300 quid a side. And this is just the jacking points area. He claims you need to strip the interior, build a big patch and then weld.

are there actually holes or just surface rust, front seats need to come out and carpet lifted or else it will burn when welding

i seen much worse! And yeah as said above - you need to strip the interior so it doesn't set on fire but you could do that bit yourself. Its prob less than an hours work to completely strip out the interior plastics and carpets.

Not sure if floor pans are available to buy for the mk1 - i know you can get complete sills new still but not seen an actual floor (not that i have really searched for one). Back when there was lots of puntos kicking about you could have re-shelled or just gone and cut the bits required from another car but finding a donor for either of them options would be hard now. If a replacement panel cannot be found then it pretty much means cutting bits out and making them out of sheet which is skilled job and gonna take a while.

you could at this point buy a cheap crappy runabout, buy a welder and have a crack youerself, learn as you go. An excellent skill to have and something i have been meaning to do for a decade and never got round to.

Whereabouts do you live dumbledore? perhaps someone knows somebody who would sort it for cheaper than going rate, i have a mate that is a dab hand with a welder up near York for example

I just did a quick google search and it seems you can get rear jacking point repair panels for both sides but i am not seeing any front parts of floor pans

rear jacking point repair panels, might find them cheaper - infact sure you can but these are first i found. Point being they exist.
http://www.bestpartstore.co.uk/fiat/punto-176/3799/10268-floor-panel

Cheers, for your help.

It looks like 300 quid per side is actually good if it includes the parts. Is good to know new panels can be found for the jacking point as that panel will be hard to make manually. The other ones should be easy as the rusted area is flat but quite long.

So it looks like I have to scrap since I need to get another runabout to fix this. I should be able to get a Mk2 with low mileage for 600 quid so probably this is what I should do.

Is a pity as I think the mk1 has the better chassis with better handling and no power steering.

I am living in north west London, so if you know any welders around here please let me know. Also I can contact welders in the Cambridge area as I am often going there.

Yup, I would say from a financial point of view it makes little sense to repair - just depends how much you want to keep it as to whether you pay up the money to get it sorted. Is the fate of most small hatchbacks eventually.

Decided to pay somebody to do the welding. Is going to cost me up to 400quid, but that should be all that is needed to get my MOT sorted, and the welder offered to do the retest for me.
Should have the car back by Friday.

dumbledore said:

Decided to pay somebody to do the welding. Is going to cost me up to 400quid, but that should be all that is needed to get my MOT sorted, and the welder offered to do the retest for me.
Should have the car back by Friday.

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remove seats+ carpets to lower costs

flisko said:

remove seats+ carpets to lower costs

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Is to late now as I have left the car with the welder. He caped the cost to 400 so I assume he will probably won't remove them and do the work from underneath. It will be interesting to see if he removes them though.

carpets might come back a bit crispy if he doesn't haha

indeed, carpet needs to come out so he will have to remove seats and carpets... could have saved an hours labour there but hey-ho, he prob would still have quoted the same and its capped so no point worrying about it now. Good to see there are still people out there prepared to cough up and have their punto repaired rather than scrap it!

Make sure its all painted and/or undersealed inside and out of repair to stop it going rusty again

Got the car back today. Is got the MOT as well.
Looks quite need the fix for the front side, pictures show one side but the other side had same work done on it. Looks like the front side was done from the outside quite quickly, the rear side he must have done from inside the car as he just added a plate from inside and left the rotten parts on the outside. He just painted over. I can still see the holes but when I pock through them I feel metal and not carpet.

you mean these holes???

they are meant to be like that, them bits front and rear aren't meant to be the jacking points (although many use them as such) - they are for when the cars are shipped around the world - they stick the hook of ratchet straps in them holes and the other end to the floor of what the car is in, say a ship, and thats how all the cars on said ship don't move around during transit. Actual jacking points are along the seam and where the crappy scissor jacks go - which you can't use with a trolley jack easy without bending the seams. I have some slotted jack pads that i put on my jacks so i can use the proper jacking points.

Anyhoo, its not the prettiest repair i have ever seen but if its solid it'll do the job fine. Its not a show car or anything so don't suppose it matters you can see the repairs.

No, I do not mean those holes obviously. But there are holes were the plate gave up around the main jacking point area (as it looks). Before repair when poking my finger through one of them, I could feel the carpet, now I can feel a plate from inside. So between the jacking point and the inside plate that is welded there are holes. Is this really a problem? The holes may trap more water causing the weld to fail earlier? And yes, I was using them as jacking points which caused the earlier failure in the first place.

Here is also a picture which I annotated.
The frame shows the area where the jack point started getting rotten off, the two circles are areas were there is a hole. Now behind these holes there is a plate welded by the garage. I believe removing the rotten jacking point would have been better. Now I just need to wait until the jacking point falls off by itself. If the welded plate behind it is OK, I won't need any more action.

so thats why they rot, cuz everyone is jacking it there...