Here 's the problem. This hole was keeping me up at night. Why? Stuff would crawl in here and I would have to put tape over it before rain storms. That's ghetto even by BangShift standards.

I started out with a sheet of scrap paper and used it to make a paper template of the hole using a ball point pen. I went around the outside of the hole because cutting down metal is easier than stretching it. I have found the latter virtually impossible without neat shop tools.

I then sourced this scrap of sheet metal from my basement. Chances are you have some of this in your basement or shop. If not, your wife has cookie sheets and baking pans. DO NOT let her find any evidence of you cutting one up. This can end badly. I know from experience.

Next, I laid my paper template onto the steel. Stuff like this is gearhead arts and crafts. Don't fear it, just slip back into third grade mode and get it done. Beer may or may not help in small quantities.

This precision outline of the paper template gave me a basic shape to work with. I then went to a tool only skilled craftsmen use.

Tin snips! What did I tell you. This is gearhead arts and crafts. I cut to the "strong" side of my lines because again, you want to leave some excess to trim off rather than cut too much and have to start anew.

Here's my plug for the hole in the roof. Ladies, please note the wedding ring. So many e-mails asking about that. So now that we have a plug, how do we position it in the hole and trim it to fit?

A magnet. Magnets are your friend when welding. There are some really bitchin' ones that chassis guys use. This is just a garden variety model I snagged off of the fridge. The U-shaped design made it perfect for my application, as you will see in the next photo.

Here's why the design works for me here. One leg of the U will cling to the roof and the other leg will hold my plug in the hole at the correct depth, in theory.

Boom goes the theory dynamite! It worked as I hoped it would. As you will note in this photo, I have some trimming and fitting to do. A couple of small snips here and there got me to the promise land. Remember, take your time and take small bites off of what you are trimming. Don't be the "I cut it three times and this is still too small," guy.

Because I was taking the piece in and out a lot to fit it, I made a reference mark to make sure I was putting it back in the same way each time. This saved me from cutting too much off or removing material from the wrong area.

When the fit was good, I busted out ol' mr. grinder to clean off the paint around the area I would be welding on. Yeah, that is a wet paper towel in there to catch any sparks that wanted to ignite the interior of the car.

Here's the cleaned off area that is ready for the acrid smell of burning MIG wire!

With my roof plug trimmed to fit and my magical magnet in place, I slapped the helmet on, waved to my elderly female neighbor with one finger extended and went to town with the metal glue gun!

Ready....FIRE....AIM! Note that the plug is no longer level with the rest of the roof in this photo. That's my amateur mistake. I had the settings wrong on my crappy welder and with a high wire speed and incorrect heat selected, the wire rammed into the plug and drove it down before making a booger on it. I popped it out, adjusted my heat setting and slowed the wire speed way down, fixing this issue. Mistakes are part of learning. Don't be ashamed, embarrassed, or pissed about it. Learn and move ahead (perhaps have another beer to ease the pain!)

By making short bursts around different parts of the plug I tried to keep the heat as even as possible to avoid warping. There are some good welds, some boogers, and some junk in there, but I decided to grind down what I had to see how well I really did.

Overall, not too bad for a hack, but it is clear I had more work to do. See the area up top that is showing a gap and some of the other little holes? The greatness of metal work is that you can get right back at it and fill the areas you missed. Weld and grind!

A few more welds, a little more grinding and I was pretty happy with what I was looking at. As a bonus, I had not set my car on fire yet! Talk about living right!

I think I did a decent job of not warping anything, either. The patch is pretty close to dead nuts even with the sheet metal of the original roof around it.

The final step would be to skim coat this with some filler to make it 100% even with the existing primer and paint. Unfortunately, my driveway zen session was ended when my two sons were trying to set one another ablaze or at least that's what it sounded like. So....

I snarfed the whole area with primer until I have a chance to do the filler and white paint. The primer will keep stuff from rusting for the time being. When it comes time to paint, I can sand it off before skimming with filler and spray bombing the roof to completely hide my handiwork. I am certainly not a professional body person and there are probably dozens of them barfing into a bucket while reading this. The point is not to be at the level of rare Ferrari restorations, but rather to fix your own car yourself and quit being afraid to tackle simply body work at home. You can do it...and probably better than me!