In the absence of suitable tools (and/or skills) to form the repair section I needed for the axle tunnel, this weekend I decided to try something simpler and weld up a couple of unnecessary holes in the inner wheel arch. Presumably these had been drilled to fit something inside the boot in the past.
The metal of this car is pretty thin though, even in the non-rusty areas and my first attempt just made the hole larger, even with the welder on its lowest setting.
Both holes started out like the bottom one!
This was annoying but hoping that the thin metal was just in the area of the original drillings I decided to try cutting out a rectangular section and making a patch repair instead. I reasoned that with luck the metal would be a bit thicker further out. It wasn't!
My patch was a pretty poor fit too. I'd taken ages just to make things worse by this point and was quite fed up so I shut the garage door and went off to do something else.
This morning I went out to see if things looked any better in the light of a new day. It actually looked worse and I also discovered I'd left the welding gas turned on overnight so had lost a significant amount of that too.
I chopped out all the previous day's work again and spent an hour making a new repair patch that fitted in the hole rather better.
Then the first tack weld blew straight through. The second and third tacks weren't much more successful.
So that's several hours work to make a poor job a lot worse. Just what I didn't need!
It would be nice to end one of these blog posts on a positive note but quite honestly the more I look at this car the more it looks like so much scrap steel. I'm really questioning whether I have the patience to persist with it.
The metal of this car is pretty thin though, even in the non-rusty areas and my first attempt just made the hole larger, even with the welder on its lowest setting.
Both holes started out like the bottom one!
This was annoying but hoping that the thin metal was just in the area of the original drillings I decided to try cutting out a rectangular section and making a patch repair instead. I reasoned that with luck the metal would be a bit thicker further out. It wasn't!
My patch was a pretty poor fit too. I'd taken ages just to make things worse by this point and was quite fed up so I shut the garage door and went off to do something else.
This morning I went out to see if things looked any better in the light of a new day. It actually looked worse and I also discovered I'd left the welding gas turned on overnight so had lost a significant amount of that too.
I chopped out all the previous day's work again and spent an hour making a new repair patch that fitted in the hole rather better.
Then the first tack weld blew straight through. The second and third tacks weren't much more successful.
So that's several hours work to make a poor job a lot worse. Just what I didn't need!
It would be nice to end one of these blog posts on a positive note but quite honestly the more I look at this car the more it looks like so much scrap steel. I'm really questioning whether I have the patience to persist with it.
Have you tryed backing the weld with some flattened copper pipe mik.
ReplyDeleteDan