I am venturing into what is for me a new world and building up lots
of sheet metal parts for my car. I have a TIG and I can drill holes in
one sheet and weld them together to make it look like a spot weld but
nothing beats the speed of spot welding when you have hundreds to do.
By the way the cosmetics of making it look like a spot weld have nothing
to do with the project, I just need to hold many pieces of sheet metal
together and spot welding seems the fastest (and best?). I have
considered rivets but for me that would be strictly a way to hold it
together until welded.
I was looking at a tong type resistance spot welder, I found that
miller, hobart (lincoln ?) are around $500-600 and then HarborFreight is
at $150. I normally avoid HF for anything with a electric plug or moving
parts but this is for a one time job, I really don't expect to be doing
this much sheet metal work again (firewall, trans. tunnel, some
flooring, inner fender wells, basically I have all the outside parts of
the body). E-bay has a bunch of no-names at $200 and much to my
surprise Eastwood has one for $480 which is less than the big names,
very surprised that EW is less than someone else on anything, I get free
shipping with EW though so that saves me money. Found nothing
Craigslist for several months now. Finishing up the wood work and need
to get started on the sheet metal within the next few weeks or less.
Looking for suggestions, will the HF unit work for one job ? will I be
sorry I got it ? and lastly, I have both a MIG and a TIG is there a
better system that I should look into ? I really like the tongs idea to
hold the thing together and spot weld it, seems like it would make my
life so much easier but the length of the tongs will be my limiting
factor so since I will have to resort to TIG'ing in some areas anyway
maybe I should consider something else. As I said, this is my first
fabrication project of this scale, usually I just restore :)
mike
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