Welding questions, mostly panel metal gauges and areas to seam weld, I have searched some and can not find what i need. Plz halp! Options

[ghuff]

My eyecrometer tells me the floors of my 914 are 20 gauge. Same for the longs. But it has a 50% accuracy rate. For instance it failed welding the u shaped cuts in the drivers side pan, but I got through that. I would rather start with a better baseline and tweak the welder settings from there.


Unfortunately I was unable to order a sheetmetal gauge from eastwood before the 5 feet of snow.

Once i have the cross support and center tunnel out I could compare them to the chart on my welder unless you guys know?

My setup is .24 wire, 25% CO2 75% Argon. I practiced on some scrap 16 gauge from the engman kit and managed to lay a good clean bead with proper penetration and no dripping or nastiness out of the back.


Need the gauge of:

Longs

Floorpans

Center tunnel/Support

Rear firewall where the hood release cable is.


Also, I have been searching and looking around for a good thread on seam welding here, but have found some bits here and there. I already know I am removing my motor and cutting into the back panel to seam the shock tower to the long, and will be seaming the trunk and shock tower sheet metal together in the actual trunk.

I had the thought of grinding an angle onto the longs to increase the surface area and seaming them together slowly, which I read in another thread as well here. But that is all I have seen. A few pictures by JP of the yellow car and that was in a thread by Andrewy I think which was abandoned, and not too heavy on content.

Can you guys share your experiences?

I went through digging into hell and a lot of other restoration type threads, but my car is still very solid so I mostly need to be seam welding, and fabricating smaller patches then covering in por-15.

The car is going to be beaten on, tracked and have an LS1 in it with very sticky tires.

I am currently removing the center tunnel and cross brace to clean rust out inside of there, seal it all back up and install the engman kit, then move on to the rest of the chassis.

[charliew]

My biggest problem is the contamination of the metals with the coatings that were put on them before they were spotwelded. They were spotwelded to keep the heat down and preserve as much of the rust prohibiting coating as possible. The heat from welding will make it all rust much faster on the inside where it's very hard to retreat with rust proofing. It would be hard to make look good but actually drilling and riveting would probably be the best way to increase strength without hurting the original rust proofing that may still be left in the seams. The thickness ga you are asking is ok to ask but each welder will need to be fine tuned to each weld such as overhead, flat and verticle and of course the two gauges of metal. Always try to start on the coldest, thickest piece and maybe start out in front and drag it back to the starting point once the arc is established so the real bead starts hot and has penetration to begin with and isn't just laying on the surface till it gets the base metal molten. I hope you don't put more problems on a straight body trying to make it stronger than it might need to be. Remember it's a light car and nomatter how much tire it has it still will break them loose, course a stiff suspension will twist it more than the rubber on the ground. I could hear the rear window moving in my j200 jeep truck when it twisted just going over rough pasture roads on the deer lease with stiff suspension.