A few more weeks!

Another few weeks have passed with some progress. The welding course is now 8 weeks old, with 4 weeks to go. After MIG welding, we did three weeks of TIG, including some Aluminium welding. Its all very nice, but all a bit finicky and expensive and slow. Then we did a week of arc welding, using the big machines at the poly, and some high quality welding rods. Wow, arc is so simple, cheap and easy! Given that I have lots of practicing to do before I start on the real thing, arc is so much cheaper and easier to practice on!

Some of the arc welding you see on some tubular steel chassis is frankly quite awful, blobby with no real structure to it. With minimal practice, an antique machine and chinese welding rods, I have produced welds that look really quite good in comparison, and I have a long way to go with improving my welding! Here is a couple of examples of my welding done in my garage.

The larger frame is a mock up of the upper layer of my chassis, but a third scale. The smaller frame will sit on one of the two similar shapes on the larger frame. They will together make the top front subframe mounts. Those bits are actually life size.

This is an inside corner weld on the main frame. Arc welding is great for these welds, especially with 'contact' rods. Just ram the rod into the corner, and drag across the join!

The smaller frame in detail, showing the butt welds. I still have some work to do on these so they look good, and a new welding machine with variable ampage would help a lot.

Last week we did gas welding. maybe its a confidence thing, but I really got on well with gas welding too! Maybe I should revisit MIG to see how good I am now. Hopefully in our last 4 weeks we will.

So, I am going towards arc welding for the whole chassis, possibly buying a new hobby machine, with variable amps between say 40 and 140, which should cover most things I need to do, or possibly a 10-80 amp inverter, and use the old machine for bigger stuff. Depends what I finally get round to welding!