I did some repair work on my old '49 Chevy suburban this weekend and was
quite frustrated by my welding skills. I was replacing the drivers side
floor with a repo panel. I punched a lot of 3/16 in holes to plug weld the
panel in place. I used vice grips and cleco's to hold the panels together.
After welding up about 20 of the holes I found that almost NONE of them
weled the two panels together. All I managed to do was fill the holes, but
not weld to the back panel. I had cleaned the back panel very well with an
8 inch 3M abrashive wheel and the metal was shiny so I would have expected
a good weld. I tried real hard to start the weld with the wire ( I'm using
a Lincoln SP-100 mig welder) directly in the center of the hole so that the
wire touches the back panel first. I had one strip that was 1 x 15 inches
with about 10 holes in it that fell off after I undid the clamps. Is it
just my technique or am I missing some important step? Of course just
enough of the floor panel holes did weld up so now I cant remove it and
repunch the holes. In frustration I welded the edges up to make a solid
weld.
I started with the floor panel for practice since it doesnt have to be as
"pretty" as the rest of the vehicle. I have a lot of patches to go so I
need to get the technique down.
Any suggestions?
Bob Chansler
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