This Will Be A Day Long Remembered…

A long time ago, a certain Dark Lord expressed his enthusiasm regarding the events of the day:

Though Vader’s memorable day wasn’t quite memorable for the reasons he thought it would be, I have high hopes last Saturday will be remembered as the day I successfully welded my first piece of sheet metal on to Mystique.

Sure, I’ve done some welding on Mystique before.

I “fixed” the driver’s side wheel house not long after I got my welder:

I also welded on a trunk floor drop off on the passenger side:

The latter work was eventually thrown out in favor of replacing the entire piece of sheet metal but it was good practice for when I need to weld the quarter panels on.

All of that work though was in places hidden from view and non-structural. Last weekend was different. Last weekend I welded in my driver’s side trunk floor.

Of course, Shop Frog had a front row seat:

I started the day by replacing my old, smelly and scary gas tank with my shiny new one. The new one bolted in for the most part with little issue:

There’s one hole on the off-brand passenger trunk floor that doesn’t line up well, but with enough cajoling it can be made to work. Once I knew everything was lined up and fit into where it needed to be, I dropped under the car and traced out the frame rails on the driver’s trunk floor:

With the tracing complete, I started drilling holes. To explain why, a little manufacturing history is in order…

Originally, the trunk floor was welded to the frame rails using a process called spot welding. Spot welding uses two electrodes placed close to one another between two or more sheets of metal. When a current is passed between the two electrodes, it heats up the metal between them – welding them together. You can see an example of what this process looks like on a DIY scale in the video below:

 

 

Spot welding is great at the factory when you have specialized welders designed to weld specific panels. It wouldn’t have worked well in my case even if I had owned the welder above due to the tight confines of the frame rails and the frame rail length compared to the leads on the unit.

In the alternative, I used plug welds. Plug welds are where you expose the base metal through a hole in the top metal and “fill in” the hole with weld to bond the panels together.

The process looks like this:

 

In order to do plug welds, many many holes need to be made. In the end, my panel looked like Swiss Cheese:

Most of those holes were made with a drill with a 3/16th drill bit. In the few areas I could, I used my pneumatic punch.

I also used my pneumatic punch on my practice metal:

One of the questions I had was what setting to configure my welder to. I was going to be welding thin sheet metal to the much thicker frame rails.  I wasn’t actually sure if I was supposed to use the setting for the thin metal or crank the welder up to the setting for the thick metal. The metal above served as my configuration test-bed to find out.

You can really see the difference in the settings in the resulting welds:

The first welds I did were on the right at the “thin sheet metal” setting on the welder. You can see that the weld is proud and just built up on the surface of the thick base metal. In fact, there was so little penetration into the tick metal that I could break the weld with a small screw driver.

The second set of welds (starting from the left) were me increasing the power of the welder. The two on the far left are still proud/tall, but there was significant penetration into the base metal and the weld was much stronger. The weld third from the left was my last weld with the welder set to the thickness of the base metal. You can see that this weld was able to bond the metal together without building up on top of the base metal and was structurally very strong.

So note to self: when plug welding dis-similar sizes of metal where the thick metal is on the bottom, use the settings on your welder for the thick base metal.

With that information gleaned, there was no more excuses to delay. It was time to weld. The first couple of welds were a little timid, but as I gained confidence the rest went really really well. When all was said and done, there wasn’t much grinding that needed to happen to make the welds flush with the panel:

Woohoo!

I also welded the trunk floor to the wheel house. As expected, these welds were difficult due to the thin metal on the wheel house in many areas and the large holes I was trying to fill at the same time:

In the end, all of the welds found good metal (I think at least) and are structurally sound. The ugliness will be covered by undercoating so that won’t be a problem. What I didn’t like was trying to fill in the big holes created when the spot welds were broken. I think when I do the passenger side, I’ll fill in the old spot weld holes and just create new (small) plug weld holes to use for welding.

When I was done, I very anxiously re-fitted my other sheet metal to see if things still lined up. If they hadn’t, I would have had to take it all off and re-weld the floor again.

I’m deeply relieved to report that things still look good. Even the bumper bracket holes line up well with the tail panel:

My lovely wife also helped me dry fit the quarter panel. Since the quarter panel isn’t cut yet, we could only do a rudimentary check, but from what we can tell that’ll work too.

 

There’s still a long way to go before Mystique’s sheet metal is back in place, but the process has now officially started and looks to be successful so far.

I’ve wanted to be able to do welding like this for most of my adult life and I’m honestly a little choked up that I actually did it.

Last Saturday will truly be a day long remembered.

Shop Frog…

I seem to have inherited a pet:

Meet Shop Frog, my newly resident amphibian. He’s taken a liking to the top of the bag holding my media blasting material. I first saw him a few days ago. Thinking “it’s awful hot in here for a frog” I caught him and gently relocated him outside in the cool area behind my shop.

The very next day, Shop Frog was back – exactly where I’d seen him the day before.

Ok then. Make yourself at home I guess. The water’s free, but you have to buy your own beer…

Trying On New Clothes…

So, uh…I’ve never been on fire before:

Over the last couple of weeks, my Honey Do List has largely kept me out of the shop save for a few hours here and there. During one of these brief respites, I was working on the passenger side metal prep when the aforementioned combustion took place.

I had started with the bare frame rail and rusty wheel house:

…and cleaned them up with a wire wheel:

While working on the wheel house, I noticed that the area that the quarter panel welds to had a couple of pin holes. I decided to fix the holes with my welder. Not being a complete idiot, I put on my welding coat and a pair of long pants and got to work. Things were going well when all of a sudden it felt a little warm. Looking down, I noticed that my pant leg had apparently caught some molten metal and was not-so-slightly on fire.

I’m actually incredibly proud of myself for not soiling my skivvies and adding to the problems of the moment. Instead, I rather calmly (I of course say this now) patted myself down with my fire proof gloves and put the fire out.

Since things could have ended up much worse, I ordered myself some new clothes that very evening. My welding jacket was soon to be joined by a pair of welding trousers and a welding beanie.

I ordered the pants extra large so they could fit over any clothes I happen to be wearing at the time in order to make getting in and out of them easier.

As you can see with the picture on the right, I am now a paragon of fashion when I weld with my bright blue welding jacket, red gloves, black and white beanie and turquoise pants.

Thankfully, while the welding clothes were on order, none of my other excursions to the shop (even those involving welding) were nearly as exciting.

Continuing with the metal prep at a later date, I also noticed a pin hole in the passenger side quarter extension bracket. This was similar to the one I observed and fixed on the driver’s side with lead solder.

In this case, I decided to actually try fixing it with my welder. In order to do so, I filed out the hole so I could reach good, thick metal on all sides:

I then used my copper backing plate and started to fill the hole. In the end, I was pretty happy with the results:

Once the quarter panel extension bracket as finished, I gave everything a bath in my rust-dissolving pink goo:

And covered everything with a weld-through primer:

And with that, I was ready to start fitting new clothes on Mystique too.

First came the trunk floors and trunk brace. I had ordered these many months ago. The driver’s side trunk floor was from a company called Dynacorn while the passenger side was a no-name brand that I purchased through National Parts Depot. I was interested to see if there was any real difference between the reputedly very good Dynacorn parts and the off-brand.

I will be buying Dynacorn parts in the future whenever possible.

The Dynacorn part just fit. It slid right in and matched the contours of the front trunk panel and wheel house almost perfectly. The no-name brand trunk floor fit, if you define fit as well, if you clamp one end into place and bend the thing it sorta matches up with the other panels.

A good example as to the quality difference between the two parts is the metal stamping in the area where the parts mate up with the front trunk floor.

The Dynacorn part (on the left) was nicely contoured, trim and neat. The no-name part (on the right) had bends and folds in the metal making it look significantly less attractive:

Even though the no-name brand’s part wasn’t as good, with enough futzing I was able to get both of them to fit into the trunk area and line up with the rear trunk brace and gas tank:

I am really glad I thought to pull the old gas tank out and fit that with these parts. The mounting holes of the gas tank demonstrated that my original fitting of the trunk floors was off. I had them incorrectly set about a quarter inch too far back towards the rear of the car. Once I had the gas tank’s mounting holes to guide me, I was able to adjust the trunk floor panels forward such that everything lined up nicely.

I also test fit the tail panel:

I didn’t test fit the quarter panels yet. I figured I’d get everything the quarter panels attach to welded into place and then cut and fit the quarters to that.

At this point, Mystique looks good in her new clothes – much better than I do in my welding fashion faux pas:

My Honey Do List is still fairly large for this weekend, but I’m really hoping that I’ll be able to start welding Mystique’s new clothes into place sometime in the next week or so.