Dig at it with an ice pick or awl, and twist it some. If the metal is solid, the best you can do is mar the paint. But that isn’t going to happen; it’s going to punch through. Remember, I’m the only one who is trying to talk you out of hacking up your car, so I’m not praying for rust! I think you ought to touch it up and call it done.
People don’t understand what they are getting into when they buy these cars. I did my best in ‘paint’ to mark out the patched areas on my fender/door. (as you can see, I’m better at ‘paint’ when it come to cars.)
The small black specks are a good example of the amount of visible rust, looking about the same as on your car, the reason people were shocked when they saw the size of holes I cut in the doors and fenders I included a backside shot of a patch on the bottom back. That rust wasn’t even showing, but since I was already hacking and burning, it wasn’t any extra work to patch that spot. I decided to let it stand as a visible patch. From the investment aspect, a visible patch allows the person to see exactly what was done. When I see something like that finished out, I automatically assume that it’s a huge chunk of bondo covering a rust hole. Also, my doors are in the top 1% of any remaining doors, so a patch like that isn’t something that will devalue the car.
If you see the hacked out quarter in my other post, there was no visible rust where the horizontal cut begins and where it ends at the bottom of the quarter. Notice how much metal I had to remove to get out all the rust. I did another ‘paint’ picture of the repaired quarter, and sketched the approximate area of metal removed. Keep in mind, there was no visible rust in that area. You have visible rust, meaning that the rust may be at an exponential than on my car.
Chances are better than good that once you get into it, it will require metal amputation at least as far as I illustrate in the picture. If I were assessing a car, a pinhole means at least 30 cm of metal amputating.
When people tell you to do this and that, lots of them have never worked on a car, let alone do this type of work. I can fix anything, but I have extensive professional experience, a well developed skill set, a fair selection of tools, and an excellent formal automotive technology education.
If you know how to do this type of work, you will hesitate to suggest that others start hacking away. (Your child is having headaches? Cut the top of the skull off, and remove a quarter size chunk of brain, and reattach the skull.) And when someone tells you to start hacking away like it’s a wax job, I question whether or not they have done such work. For instance, I hacked half of my quarter off and patched it. See how easy that was? 10 words. Anybody can do it, type in 10 words! Why don’t they ever include pictures of what they did?
Again, I think it would be a bad idea for you to start chopping into your car, but please listen to whomever you want.
