Hey all, just figured i'd share my experience getting the rear chassis legs of my Evo IX repaired. I never knew the true extent of the rust but it was the only real noticeable area that could be seen under the car. Part of me hates sharing this type of material since it's hard to post about my car not being perfect or pristine, but it is what it is and i feel that this type of information will help the community overall.

For starters, most places that claim to do rust repair were either way too busy or they were getting out of the business and wouldn't take this project on. On Halloween night, i was walking by my neighbors house who owns an RX7 shop and was complaining to him about not being able to find a shop to even look at the undercarriage of my car. He has a shop guy that works on Mitsu's and said they would take it on.

Within a week of that discussion, i had it on a lift at his shop and torn down.










The shop cut out the rust areas, patch welded the legs back and coated with rust inhibiting primer and 3M underbody coating.







Overall, i'm very pleased with how everything turned out and the very reasonable cost of the work. I guess my message is that if you've got some level of chassis leg rust that hasn't excessively spread, it's not unimaginable to get it fixed.

Cheers

 

Believe it or not, this type of content is MUCH more helpful than someone showing off how pristine their car is. It looks like they did an excellent job and now you don't have to worry about the rust spreading and causing more damage. I hope that more shops continue to perform these types of repairs, especially in areas of salt and snow. Thanks for posting this Andy!

 

Great transformation/restoration!

 

I saw on youtube our gas tanks rust really bad up north. I hope you inspected yours

 

Thanks for the input! Actually that lead to a little more expense since we had to take care of the gas tank. Since the body of the car above the gas tank was really clean actually, the gas tank ended up taking the brunt of the wear from the MD salt/brine. We ended up cleaning up the tank and then priming/3M coating that as well, but we didn't dare chance replacing hardware since we would have most likely opened a bigger can of worms. I hope in the future someone comes up with a good way to get fuel tanks and other parts here in the US.

 

What was the cost?

 

well done! that should last another 15 years get yourself a 90degree attachment for the powerwasher, it makes underwashing easy, to get rid of the salts

 

I really want to see their process for this, not just before & after photos.

 

For the chassis clean up and fuel tank clean up it was just shy of $2k (which I felt was very reasonable)

 

I wish I had those pictures, but in general the shop used hole saw sizes to cut the rust areas out and then cut the same size holes from plate stock and weld patched them in.

The majority of my pictures were from the tech working on it, but I stopped by several times to check on it. After dealing with the local Mitsubishi dealer and another shop that’s now out of business, I have a hard time trusting anyone to work on my car. On the positive side, it’s given me the drive to work on it more myself, which is enjoyable since I know exactly what’s been done.

 

The shop did a great job with the repair! Random question, do you know where they were able to purchase the parts themselves? I've been looking online and I see that the driver side MN150944 has been discontinued. I'd like to purchase both L and R sides but I can't seem to find them.

 

This retailer in the UK has them. They have a large inventory of rare parts. https://www.rosssport.com/Brands/ROS...nt-Set-Evo-4-9

 

I bought MN150944 from the dealer last summer. This was the worst of the two sides being above the muffler. Driver side was more protected by the filler neck and EVAP canister. The fact that one is discontinued is a joke. I simply don't trust Mitsubishi to not continue to run their best model into the ground. They nearly discontinued MN150944 before allowing 6 month special orders.

More and more videos keep popping up because 20 years old cars and rust never sleeps.
This video here shows the patch job method of fixing rear leg rust: - skip through to the 10 min mark or so.

Otherwise, if you do have rear sidemembers, the autotorque way which is a hell of a lot more work: https://www.autotorque.net/chassis-leg-replacement/

 

Before i found out the rust could be weld repaired vs. having to replace the entire rear chassis leg, i did reach out to RossSport and it was going to cost me nearly $2k to get the legs shipped to me in MD. This was when the Euro was strong vs. the dollar, not sure what it would be these days, maybe $1,500? Good luck!

 

Thanks for the link! I appreciate the help.