Welding Tips and Tricks

Not exactly sure what this guy has in mind for this puppy, I only know what he has asked me to do to it. He had me weld up the transmission mount on the top side several months ago. He didn't do his part correctly and he snapped the wheel studs that he used to tie the engine back to the transmission. My weld held. This time he's having me weld a 3/8" X 1 1/2" X 3 1/4" plate to the bottom side. He also wants me to weld up those bolt holes. The holes are the only part that give me pause for concern.
Wish me luck!

Good luck.

Get some 6061 bolts made (or copper) or threaded rod and screw them in to the holes below the surface and just weld to fill.

Haven't seen you round these parts in awhile Rambo, how's it going?

You could always just fill those holes with HTS...

Electrode had a good idea too. Unless those bolt holes are going to be re-drilled and tapped, thread something in there and weld over them. Question is why bother filling them shut at all?

Filling those bolt holes was a no go. It kept blowing the rod back into my electrode. Putting in a plug was one avenue that the owner was thinking about as well. Good call. I think he's wanting to redrill and tap the holes. He said something this morning about having six bolts in there instead of four. It looks like he may want me to weld the engine and transmission cases together as well.
Here's the end result. This thing was a real bitch to weld. Base metal kept wanting to float to the surface and dance around in circles. I finally settled on lowering the heat a bit and making several single line passes over the ugly ass beads and that really seemed to help tie things in. I was getting a lot of explosions. I assume this was due to zinc content in the casting because I have a lot of white, milky smoke all over my cup and the bottom side of the tab.
You can see from the last photo that this thing welded like hammered shit/Fido's butt. I did the best that I could. It just didn't want to cooperate with me. I've never had this much trouble welding anything before. It looks about like an aluminum stick weld.

You could counter sink the holes at an angle that would allow you to fill them back in. It would take more tome and filler but would let you fill it in with good material.

I'm gonna try cutting off a bunch of rods at about 3"4" and stuffing them into the holes. Burn em in from there.

I would not weld the 2 cases together, be a royal pain in butt to work on internals of transmission or motor, hell just getting it out of unit of welded together would be a pain. Not uncommon to need transmission work on these do to abuse. Lot of time they get swamped water gets into them. My question on these repairs are why? is there other mounts that are broke, loose, worn out putting stress on these mounts. We got customers that abuse the heck out of these at the dealership and this hasn't been a problem.

The why is because he doesn't want to do it right. I can't offer you any better explanation than that. Those holes on the bottom are twice the size that they should be because he put some inserts in them which he had to promptly remove. The inserts were the wrong size. They were much like a grade 8 helicoil but they were solid inserts. He also drilled the hole in the wrong place when i fixed the transmission for him last summer. He screws the pooch every time he touches this thing. Can't get him to listen to reason.

Gotcha that explains it. I can sell him a transmission case

Transmission case isn't the problem. This is the engine. Its one of the first of these RZRs and they do not hold up to roll overs very well. He didn't know this thing was broken when he bought it.

Take his money! I have people that won't take no for an answer and I charge them double. Seriously, take the guys money. stupidity should be painful on some level.

We got motors laying around too.

I'll find out what year his machine is in case this whole thing goes south. I'm fairly certain that it's from either the first or second production year of the RZR.
I got the holes filled in but I'm not sure how deeply everything is penetrated. I cut short sections of rod and put them in the holes before blasting those bastards with 200 amps for between 20 and 30 seconds, then added in filler by hand to fill the remaining voids. I'm hoping that I have about 1/2" of metal tied into the depths of each hole. Who knows though. Only gonna find out by drilling and tapping them again.
This engine case has an amazing ability to soak up some heat. The transmission housing didn't require anything close to this level of power.

"Take his money! I have people that won't take no for an answer and I charge them double. Seriously, take the guys money. stupidity should be painful on some level."

Amen!