Cracked Rusted Truck Tailgate is Loose How to Repair a Broken Tailgate Yourself

Okay. Let's get out here. Oh, what was that? Oh, jeez. Great.

Hey friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. So I was getting out of the back of this pickup truck. Of course, I'm stepping off and I'm on the tailgate, I put a little bit of pressure on it. And as you can tell, it's not in the best condition. This is something that can be common to happen, especially on older vehicles like this one right here. This is a 1994. It's been around for a little while. And of course, there's gonna be some areas that are going to get a little bit weak over time. I wanna go ahead and fix this because let me show you this. I wanna try to shut it... With having the hinge damaged like this right here, it's making it so I'm having an issue locking in this tailgate. I can't drive down the road with this rattling around, especially if I have any gear in the bed itself. I'm just gonna go ahead and shut this.

Maybe. All right. So we've got it shut, now you could probably drive down the road. Is it gonna rattle around a little bit? Yeah. Could it potentially break free and open up on me? Yes. Let's go ahead and try to open this now. Hold on. I can do it. That's not something that I wanna do every time I try to use this tailgate. I'm gonna have to fix it. Let's get into it. So I'm looking at this tailgate right here, and I can see exactly where it broke. This is the hinge point where it's supposed to mount to the body of the truck itself. Of course, that's welded on there, that looks fine. But when I try to flex it a little bit like this, you can see that it just completely rotted away, it was very thin, and now it's broken and the tailgate won't shut right. Now if I was to just take this little piece of wood right here, I'm gonna slide it in between just like this, I'm gonna carefully press, you can see that this kind of spreads a little bit and it lines up perfectly. Now what I wanna do is just kind of grind this down, I'm gonna clean it up, I'm gonna grab a piece of metal and we'll weld it, so it's nice and flush. Now if you're a perfectionist, you probably wanna just go ahead and replace this whole tailgate right here. This is an older vehicle, like I said before, it's a little bit hard to try to find one of these tailgates. It's got a much smaller bed than a lot of the more common trucks that you probably see on the road, so it's a little hard to find. I don't necessarily have that type of time, just go ahead and keep searching around and around and around. I just wanna try to do a quick, easy fix, it's something that I can do in my driveway or in the backyard with some parts that I have laying around. A fix that you could potentially do for this would be to cut out this whole corner right along here and just try to replace it or fabricate something. That's gonna be a lot of work and I could potentially cause an issue with the tailgate itself, where maybe I'm going to have to try to paint color-match this, which obviously I'm not super worried about on this one. And I might even mess up my decal right up along here. I really love this Chevrolet decal that comes across the tailgate and I don't wanna mess it up. So what I'm gonna do is I'll just bring this down like that, I'm gonna clean up this entire area right along here. So I'll sand it down, so there's no rust, and then we'll go ahead and grab some metal and we'll weld in a plate. Let's have a quick look at this tailgate and see exactly where we have to grind down. Now what I wanna do is I wanna create a plate that's gonna go across this area here, all the way over to there, so that way there when I have this flush, I'll be able to weld it in and then it'll sit perfectly. But I also wanna come up along this area here. This is gonna help add some structure and some reinforcement to the plate that I create. I'm gonna come right along like this, bring it down so I have plenty of space coming along this and then I even wanna get up along this ridge right here. Once again, this is all for structure and try to make it as strong as possible.

We've got it sanded down. Let's figure out how much metal we're gonna need. I'm just gonna use a piece of cardboard for this and essentially I just wanna use it and see exactly where I need to go. I only wanna come along this lip right here. So I'm gonna go ahead and press that down and into where it needs to be. Then I'll bring this up and along here, and then we can just trim this. This is gonna give us a rough estimate of exactly how much metal I need to create this plate. Okay. So I've got this pretty much figured out, the exact size that I need. Let's go ahead and bring this over to the bench, we'll find some metal and then we can cut ourselves a plate. Now I found some metal. I don't necessarily wanna go with something that's small and weak like this. It's very thin and as you can tell, it's gonna keep flexing, and then it's just gonna break apart. Get rid of that. I also don't wanna use something that's like this. This is entirely too thick. This is gonna be a little bit overkill and it's gonna be very hard to cut and especially try to bend it in the shape that I need it to be. We're gonna need to find something a little bit different so let's get back inside. Of course, I could potentially go to the store and find some sheet metal that's gonna be thick enough but not necessarily over thick for the job at hand but I have a little bit of exhaust pipe that I went ahead and I cut off of an exhaust, because I don't necessarily need it on there. So what I wanna do, so I'm just gonna put it in the vise here. I'll gently crimp it down. I wanna cut a nice slice in this, we'll pound it down so it's nice and flat. We'll trim it to the size we need and then we can get back over to the truck.

All right. Now we can take our template. I'm gonna line it up, as many corners as I can here. Do as little cutting as possible. Cut. Oh, dang. All right. So this is looking great at this point. The only thing I noticed is I have a lot of really sharp edges on this, and I don't like having any sharp edges. I'm just gonna go ahead and use this sanding disc right here and carefully grind it down so it's nice and smooth. All right. This looks really great. Now at this point, I wanna start thinking about where I wanna make my bends. I wanna come straight across from at least this lip right here, going in towards this, coming straight up and then over this way. So essentially just kind of give a rough estimate or even take a measurement with a tape measure and see exactly how much of a lip we need to make here. We'll just go ahead and draw it on there with something semi-permanent, at least something that we can see after we start bending it. And then of course, we'll come up and we'll do the other bend after we're done with the first one. All right. So I've got that on there. It looks like the lip pretty much lines up. If yours doesn't, you just wanna make sure you grind it down so it doesn't hit up against the body of the truck.

Okay. So we built our little plate here, and what I wanna do is just put it right over this, put it approximately where it's gonna be. Now you can tell this is gonna come right along this area right here. That's where we'll make our bead. I have a couple slices on here because the tailgate kind of bends in, so I wanna be able to flex this in, once I have it tack welded on. I also drilled some holes on the plate right along here because I wanted to put in some plug welds, that's gonna give it some extra structure and some extra strength and stability. Now at this point, I'm ready to get going on welding this in. I've got my safety protection. Let's get started.

Now that I've got this tacked in place, I'm just gonna go ahead and bend it and make it take the shape of the tailgate. Okay. So we've got this welded up. Now I went ahead, I cleaned it up, you can tell that there's a couple nice beads coming across here. It's gonna hold it nice and stable. And then of course, we have all those plug welds that we put on there. We want to try to make this as structurally sound as possible, so when we're driving down the road, we don't have to worry about anything. Now that we've got it together, before we paint it, let's go ahead and test it. Give it a nice light slam. As you can tell, it doesn't necessarily line up perfect, but this is an older truck. I'm not exactly a body guy, I did the best I could. Let's go ahead and see if it opens now. Try it again. Perfect. Perfect. You got to shake this stuff up good. Now the next thing I wanna do is just kind of block off the areas of this that I don't wanna necessarily paint. I don't wanna leave this bare metal like that, because it's gonna rust and that's gonna cause another issue. I'll just go ahead and carefully coat it.

Okay friends, so we got this tailgate, so it's working perfectly. Does it look perfect? No. But it does work the way that I need it to. Of course, when I went ahead and I welded everything together, I wanted to make sure that I coated again with paint because I don't want it to rust out again after a couple years of driving down the road. I feel confident that this tailgate's gonna work great for years. I hope you liked the video. I hope you learned a little something. If it's something that you think somebody is having an issue with and you wanna share it with them, feel free to share it with them, it would mean everything to me. If you like the video or love the video, go ahead and smash on the like button for me, it'd mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe and ring the bell. That way there, you and all of your friends can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.