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.

[J P Stein]

The only time I had shrinkage problems is when I originally put in the cage.
I got carried away ( my first run through with car welding) when I put in backing plates for the tubes.....1/4 inch plates, full fillets & plug welds. Too much welding, too much heat too quickly.....shrunk the door opening on the pass side. That made for some rework.. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/dry.gif) Fixed it and learned from it.

I can show pics of what/where I seam welded. I went after the areas that break/ crack most commonly ( to the best of my knowledge, at the time).

The date on the pic is right for once.

[ghuff]

The only time I had shrinkage problems is when I originally put in the cage.
I got carried away ( my first run through with car welding) when I put in backing plates for the tubes.....1/4 inch plates, full fillets & plug welds. Too much welding, too much heat too quickly.....shrunk the door opening on the pass side. That made for some rework.. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/dry.gif) Fixed it and learned from it.

I can show pics of what/where I seam welded. I went after the areas that break/ crack most commonly ( to the best of my knowledge, at the time).

The date on the pic is right for once.

More please. Post away! Flood the thread if you will (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Oh btw, the trans tools are still hanging out on my work bench. I will have to ADD over into using them soon (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)