I do welding repairs on the side (weld and fit professionally) and have found a lot of escapes that have a rusted out passenger wheel house. I have a customer interested in having the repair made on a hybrid. I do not know much about them other than what I have found the last hour or so researching them. I found the service manual on how to remove the battery (from alldata).

The battery is less than 6 inches from where I would be welding. There are many warnings in alldata about wearing special rubber insulating gloves like the kind you would use working around industrial type electric, establishing a buffer zone around the car and wearing a face shield. Other than that it looks to be very straight forward. If it was a 12 volt battery I would not even be on here asking. However it is very high voltage 330 . Is this something people DIY?

I have a cherry picker and it looks like it might take me an additional hours time to remove the battery, If I depower the system and use safe common sense working practices.

Thanks for any advice.

 

I'm not a welder, but I did a bit of arc welding in high school. The hybrid battery is disconnected from the rest of the car when it's shut off. The case is pretty substantial. It's hard to see how welding nearby could risk an electrical problem or a breach of the case. So if you shielded the battery against hot spatters, such as a plumber might when using a torch near wood, my opinion is that you'd be safe.

 

I went ahead and took the job on today. Removing the battery was easy and was necessary due to how close I needed to be weld and grind. Also I would have been sitting on it the whole time. Luckily I have a cherry picker or else I would not want to try and remove the battery.

I disarmed the battery and started removing the rear interior sections. Followed the manual on removal procedure and had it out in no time. There are only 15 bolts maybe and three plugs. These are not autobody type quality repairs where you would buy the replacement panel and cut out spot welds and reweld in the entire panel. People do not want to pay for that work on a part of the car that is unseen and most of the vehicles I have done have 100k plus.

Here are a few pictures of the one I did today and some from previous escapes (they all rust very similar here in northeast ohio).

 

Hey Chevy power I got an escape with the same problem, where are you located?

 

I'm in the Dayton Ohio area and have a 2007 Ford escape hybrid with the rusted out rear passenger wheel well shock mount. How much to replace it? Do u still do these repairs?