FYI: Some welding tips Car related, Feel free to add yours Options

[rick 918-S]

Lots of you guys will know this stuff but some may find it helpful. Here are a couple of photos of a Mercedes I'm working on for a friend. This car was butched back in the 70's. I'm trying to put it back together. All the spot weld flanges are damaged with brazing. The brass needs to be removed and replaced with steel so I can spot weld the car back together.

Some of the flanges are good for the most part, So I'm not cutting them off completely and making new ones. Were I can, I use a piece of copper and simply run a couple beads of weld across the copper and then grind/file the weld back to the thickness of the metal.

Your wire feed will actually arc on the copper. So you can even start your arc just off the edge of the metal your repairing and then move into the damaged edge.

This also works good for a backer on small holes. The copper will pull some of the heat out of the weld causing a rapid cooling effect.

A simple source for copper flatbar is soft copper tubing. If you've done any home plumbing repair you probably have a piece of copper tubing under the work bench. Just hammer it flat and your in business.

[rick 918-S]

Thanks Mikey! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Here's another Tip:

You can make your own anti-sway bars using 4130 thin wall tubing. I did quite a bit of reading about welding the stuff. Lots of guys are tig welding this type of tubing, but the experimental air plane builders are convinced the best method is to gas weld it. And it passes the FAA certification. So if it's good enough for the FAA it's good enough for the Alien. The tig weld looks really nice but cools too quick causing the weld to become brittle. Gas welding will expand the heat out into the tubing a little further and you can control cooling with the torch. Here's a project I have been working on for a while. I hope to have my front and rear bars installed this spring.



Here's the piece tacked in place. Notice I wire brushed the tubing to clean it. Also I chamfered the tube for maximum penetration.



Here I'm welding the 90 deg fitting to the arm while it is clamped in a fixture. The fitting will slide onto the cross bar and get a grade 8 through bolt to secure it.



Here's the bar as it is now. I need to finish this project.