Welding Tips and Tricks

I was fortunate enough to have my late grandfather teach me how to gas weld at age 4 (yes, 4!), then stick weld at age 5 (I am 45 now). Back in high school I MIG welded for my family business, making pallet racking in a small production shop. Eventually supervised the welding shop. I rebuilt a drag car chassis back in 1988 (bought it as a back-half car, crashed it hard when an engine let go at the top end, converted it to a full tube chassis car). That was all mild steel and MIG welding. I have continued welding up hobby projects over the years, either at dad's shop with one of the Millermatic 200 or 250's, or with my own Century 120V MIG (small one I kept in the race car trailer) or Airco Dip-pack 200. A little over a year ago I decided to buy a 4130 race truck chassis and do some modifications, so I picked up an Eastwood TIG200 and started practicing (and watching a bunch of the videos on this site). The chassis turned out to have too many problems, so I ended up tearing it down to a couple of tubes and starting over essentially from scratch. Getting close to the point of having the chassis certified, but just ran into some welding issues (about to post a thread on that).

Regards,
Michael Pliska

Hey,

Welcome to the forum. Its sounds like you caught the bug early.

Mick

MichaelP wrote: Getting close to the point of having the chassis certified, but just ran into some welding issues (about to post a thread on that).

Regards,
Michael Pliska

Welcome to the site Michael! Looking forward to your chassis post. There a few motor heads around this place.

Thanks for the welcome! I posted my question under the TIG forum:
http://forum.weldingtipsandtricks.com/v ... f=5&t=2778

Here is a link showing my project (towards the top there is a link to the prior posts):
http://www.isspro.com/blog

Welcome

In age of 4, not bad

Thanks for sharing your project link! Very interesting so say the least.

"I do my best to always keep the doors closed when doing something noisy, but my neighbors probably still hate me!"
Just wait till you fire that bad boy up about 2:00 AM!!! Then you'll KNOW they hate you.

Fat Bob wrote:Thanks for sharing your project link! Very interesting so say the least.

"I do my best to always keep the doors closed when doing something noisy, but my neighbors probably still hate me!"
Just wait till you fire that bad boy up about 2:00 AM!!! Then you'll KNOW they hate you.

LOL! Actually this will be pretty quiet at an idle since it's an electronically injected diesel. The friend's race truck that I have been driving (MBRP-Sponsored DirtyMax truck) is less noisy than my dually when driving around the pits! The thing they probably hate me for is when I am working on my big-block Vega race car to get ready to leave for a race in the middle of the night. My house has a really steep driveway up to the street (built into the side of a hill), so no way to load the car in the driveway, I have to fire it up and zig-zag it up the driveway diagonally a few times to keep from high-centering, then load it in the trailer up on the street. Even with mufflers on the race car it's still pretty loud, so I only do that in the middle of the night if there is no other choice! By comparison this diesel race truck will be downright quiet! However I will probably bring both of them with me when going to most out-of-town races, and with my luck it will be the Vega that was in the garage being worked on!

Welcome to the forum.