Rave's illustrated guide to MIG welding

[Rave]

I apologise in advance for the poor quality- and slight paucity- of photos in this post. I have a screw on macro lens and a ringflash for my 450d but I wasn't going to take that into the garage with a MIG welder, so they were all taken on my £60 Technika compact. I probably should have taken a few more photos, but when you're sweating, fretting and swearing, taking photos is a secondary thought.

Anyway, to set the scene: shortly after its last MOT, the cheapo pattern backbox on my mum's Clio diesel rusted away and broke where the link pipe meets the silencer.



I first of all tried to fix it with a beer can, some Jubilee clips and a load of silicone sealant. That lasted about 30 minutes. A couple of months ago I replaced the beer can with a baked bean tin on the basis that it would be stronger (as shown in the pic above). That also lasted....30 minutes.

About a year ago Aldi sold a gasless MIG welder for £99.99. At the time I had an old Maestro outside the house with a rusty bulkhead that wouldn't have taken much welding to get through the MOT. Nice, I thought, but I really want a Gas capable welder. Aldi didn't sell one and then the Maestro's tax ran out so it got scrapped (probably for the best). Fast forward to last month though and they had a Gas/No Gas welder for £139.99.

Right now I have a Peugeot 106 Rallye outside my house. It also doesn't have an MOT, but not because it's rusty. Nevertheless I couldn't resist and the welder went in the trolley.

So anyway, the Clio's MOT was due and I thought I could at least get some use out of my impulse purchase welder. So I dragged it round my mum's. Parked the Clio on the big high kerb outside her house with a brick under the NSR wheel, crawled underneath, and the two bits of exhaust came off easily enough.

Now, to weld properly you really need clean metal to weld to. The best idea would be to clamp the pipe in a vice and use a decent Angle grinder/cutter. I just grabbed the pipe in one hand, and in the other:



...my £12.99 eBuyer angle grinder with a grinding disc from Aldi. Result:

.

Smooth! The silencer got the same treatment:



So then I got the welder out of its box and set about studying the instructions. I eventually got the wire installed and feeding out of the torch; MIG wire is springy stuff with a real penchant for unwinding itself all over the place.

It's best to firmly clamp your work pieces together at the correct angle. I had no clamps though and my best guess at the correct angle was that when the silencer was horizontal, the end of the link pipe should be too. So I just held it in the right place:



I should mention that while peering down the link pipe I'd noticed another small rust hole and ground it off so I could fill it with weld. I thought I took a picture of this, turned out I didn't. So anyway, after my first attempt with the welder, this was the result:



Blurry pic sorry. Anyway you can see that the hole is not filled with weld- in fact I'd burned an even bigger hole. The pipe is also not tack welded to the silencer as I had hoped.

[Rave]

I should mention at this point that it's good practice to work in an open and clutter free environment with no hazards. I OTOH decided to work here:



....the punchbag being strategically placed so that I hit my head on it every time I stood up.

After that first failure I did some internet research as to why the .6mm MIG wire I was using wasn't feeding smoothly- half an hour later realised I wasn't using the right feed roller. I installed it with some difficulty and then really thought I was ready to rock as the wire came shooting out of the torch every time I pressed the trigger.

First I managed to plug the little hole:



....nothing's gonna get past that!

So then I went back to the main task of butt welding the two bits of pipe together. And I managed it, just about.

When you're MIG welding, you want to end up with a nice smooth bead like this:



(Image cheekily hotlinked from here, hope they don't mind).

What you don't want to end up with is this abomination:



....which looks like Beelzebub's chalfonts after he's been crapping fire and brimstone for a month.

So anyway, back on the car. Or so I thought. The pipe has to link over the NS swinging arm, and there's a joint in the cheapo aftermarket pipe to facilitate this. Of course it had rusted solid and there was no chance of splitting it. In the end we had to remove the rear wheel (which required a bicycle ride back to mine to retrieve my torque wrench, the bolts having corroded against the wheel). We then forced the bugger through with a lot of swearing, nearly severing the rear brake pipe in the process. Eventually it went on, although I could not get the middle mounting rubber on whatever I tried. Probably because my clampless, handheld attempt at getting the alignment right wasn't really all that:



...the pipe now sits at a rakish 30 degree angle. Jaunty! We fired up the engine and....the exhaust was much quieter than the tappets and injector pump. Clearly, 95%+ of the gas was now going through the silencer. I had a bit of a feel round the weld though, and sure enough there were a few little jets of gas escaping from holes in my brilliant weld.

So in six hours of annoying, and extremely hot and sweaty work, I turned a car that would certainly fail its MOT, into one that would probably fail its MOT.

[Rave]

......and yes, it did fail. BUT.....NOT because of my leaky weld!!!! It was because of the missing exhaust mounting, which the garage cured for £1.80 (presumably with some sort of universal rubber mount, there's no way that I can see that they could have got an original mount on there). It also failed on smoke, which puzzled me- I've never seen it smoke at all. That was cured with some Redex and a quick high speed blast. And....a failed sidelight which I should have spotted.

So, one slightly overpriced oil and filter change and two hours labour later the Clio's set for another year for a total of £244.

So the government can stick their scrappage scheme up their arse, as far as I'm concerned.

[TeePee]

Not meaning to be rude.. But did you use 150GBP of tools for the first and only time, to fix a 30GBP part? If so, nice job! A proper Man-task too!

[Barney]

classic example of pigeon sh!t welding, I'm at the same quality level and never go near welding rigs now

[0iD]

Originally Posted by TeePee

Not meaning to be rude.. But did you use 150GBP of tools for the first and only time, to fix a 30GBP part?

Because Rave's a man's man! ...and because he could

Like you say

Originally Posted by TeePee

A proper Man-task too!

'nuff sed

[Fraz]

Hahah good effort. That is one of the worst welds I've ever seen, but probably better than I could do

Also love your Ebuyer + Aldi tool-buying skillz

[wombar]

Haha, this thread certainly cheered me up this morning

Welding is something I've always wanted to learn, but I'm a menace with a soldering iron so it's probably something I should steer clear from. That weld may not be the best, but at least you managed to get the two pieces attached (whereas I would have set fire to them and the rest of the house most likely ).

Practice makes perfect though, so keep going and you'll be everyones best friend at MOT time I call shotgun for Raves welding services (after a little more practice ).

Good thread

[ANZAC_ELITE]

I am an NDT Technician.

Please practice further before submitting a weld test sample


All in the best possible taste of course (aka Kenny Everett)

[JPreston]

Originally Posted by TeePee

Not meaning to be rude.. But did you use 150GBP of tools for the first and only time, to fix a 30GBP part? If so, nice job! A proper Man-task too!

Aldi and Lidl often have welders (and associated gear) in for cheap, maybe £40, don't know whether mig or arc though.

[Zak33]

This is killing me, this thread

I'm in fits. RAVE..you are a very very funny man.

However...on a more serious note...

106Rallye? Pictures please. Those are just.... lovely.

[schmunk]

Originally Posted by Zak33

106Rallye? Pictures please. Those are just.... lovely.

Rave's new motah [

[yamangman]

I came to this thread seriously expecting you to be building a Russian fighter jet. Dissapointed.

[Rave]

Annoyingly, I went round my mum's to collect the car last night, and had a look at the MOT sheets. They mentioned a knocking noise from the front suspension going over speed bumps which 'needs investigating'. I told my mum that I'd never noticed it. Got in the car to drive it home, hit a speed bump, and bam, massive thud and the whole car juddered unnervingly.

But it definitely wasn't like that when I nipped down the shops after refitting the exhaust on Monday.

I hope it's a coincidence, and that a suspension bush or something has collapsed, but TBH it looks a bit poor that the car was delivered to the garage with perfectly working suspension and came back with it knackered. Gonna have to take the wheel off on Monday and see if I can spot the problem.

Originally Posted by TeePee

Not meaning to be rude.. But did you use 150GBP of tools for the first and only time, to fix a 30GBP part? If so, nice job! A proper Man-task too!

Dunno. I assumed the part would be more like £60; in any case it'll need one for next year's MOT I guess (although if I've got any sense I'll get under there with a load of exhaust paint to try and prevent it rusting again). Just looked, and GSF seem to want about £40 inc vat for a silencer for a petrol model, but they don't specifically list one for the 1.9D- not sure if they're the same or not.

TBH, it would have been almost as much faff buying and fitting a new pipe, as the nearest GSF's in Brixton.

Originally Posted by wombar

Practice makes perfect though, so keep going and you'll be everyones best friend at MOT time I call shotgun for Raves welding services (after a little more practice ).

Yeah, I hope so; but even old bangers don't rust much any more it seems. The only rust on the Clio is on the front door frame where the paint split when a ferry crewman forced it wide in order to break in, me having locked the keys inside. My brother crunched the NSF wing on a bollard 3 or 4 years ago, putting a dent in it and taking some of the paint off. It's had some bare metal there ever since and hasn't rusted at all. It's properly galvanised. I only wish my old MR2 had had the same, I'd probably still be driving it now.

I need to get some scrap steel and practice I think. I might need to sort out a better power supply arrangement, as the manual is full of dire warnings about the higher power setting blowing 13 amp fuses, and the need to wire it in directly to a 20 amp feed. I used it on power setting 3, and plugged it in with an old and cheapo extension lead, and the plug didn't even get slightly hot that I could feel.

My only other plan for the welder it at the moment is to chop up the non-functioning Kawasaki ER-5 outside my house and turn it into a 'cafe racer'; I'd like to fit a single seat tailpiece and try and fabricate some sort of ride height adjuster to jack the rear up a bit. On this evidence I'd better do quite a bit of practice before I fit a cutting wheel to my ebuyer grinder.

Originally Posted by JPreston

Aldi and Lidl often have welders (and associated gear) in for cheap, maybe £40, don't know whether mig or arc though.

Yeah? I've never seen one for £40, although you can buy an arc welder for not a great deal more than that from Machine Mart. I have a couple of arc welders in my shed, one of which is a massively heavy oil cooled one inherited from a dead relative whose job was welding up gas mains and the like. Arc welding doesn't really cut it for automotive work though so I never really got round to using them. I ought to have sold the biggun a couple of years ago for its copper content while commodity prices were sky high, would have got a bit I think.

Originally Posted by yamangman

I came to this thread seriously expecting you to be building a Russian fighter jet. Dissapointed.

That would have been a MiG welding thread though surely? As in Mikoyan Gurevich. MIG welding aluminium is a fools errand as I understand it so my £140 Aldi welder would only be really useful on a MiG-25.

Anyway thanks all, glad you enjoyed the thread.