Hotsparks - Thanks for the advice. The reason i dont have a guard on the grinder is i took it off one day and lost the bolt that clamps it tight, oops. Im not saying it will never kick on me but ive never used the handle since i started working with metal, i know how it feels when it kicks so i always position my hands to counter act it (il probably chop my finger off next time i use it now that ive wrote that). The welds are lumpy due to the crappy Mig i have, something is not right with the wire speed control, its like it works in reverse. The higher the amps go the slower the motor goes, the lower the amps the faster the wire. I mean there is a wire control speed knob but its supposed to be in sync with the amperage.
September 2011
The Consul finally got picked up. I managed to get £1800 which is pretty good, £800 profit. I feel quite sad to let it go. I said to my dad that the only way I could compare it was like having a girlfriend that you love, but things haven't been working out for a while and you know the best thing is to let them go. The guy who bought it seems decent enough, him and his son are going to restore it together he says so hopefully it will be back as good as new and another it gets another generation interested in old cars. I would love to buy it back in the future but we'll have to see eh.
Back to the van, using the profits from the Consul I bought myself a new toy.
Its a 160amp Tig welder. The brand is R-tech which seem to have not too bad reviews. Its a British company that sources the parts from Germany and Asia. They use there own schematics and everything is covered by a 2 year guarantee. Im really happy with it. Its been about 3 years since I last used a tig, and that was for welding 50mm tubing at 3mm thick. Its a bit trickier on 1.2mm sheet. The reason I got it is to save time and get a better weld. It does take longer welding than the mig but a hell of a lot quicker and neater to grind/sand the welds up afterwards.
I have been trying to recreate the guttering myself, I cut 10 metres worth of 50x1.2 strips using the guillotine at my old work. The idea was to also use there sheet metal folder. The only problem was when I got there I remembered just how******there folder was. Im sure in its day it was great but after about 60 years of use it wouldn't give me the crisp fold I wanted. I was able to fold the safety edge though, as that was going to be pressed against its self anyway . I bent a 5mm lip as far as it would go, about 120 degrees then seeing as I never had a press I thought I could hammer the lip flat. It didn't quite work out as I hoped. As I hammered the lip there was bits that I squashed and nipped more than others so I never got a good straight line, doh!, oh and eh, I done that to all 10 metres, bigger doh!. I managed to straighten the edge out a bit by sanding and filing it. Seeing as the max length my folder would hold is 600mm I cut the strips to 500mm.
You can see the hammer marks but as this was going to be the inside it never really mattered, the outside was still smooth.
I tried it out on my folder but I just wasn't happy with it. To fold a bit of 1.2mm 500mm long doesn't sound like much but you would surprised by the amount of force it takes. As it was bending the blade was lifting ever so slightly in the centre at the weakest point so I would get a nice crisp fold on the sides but the centre was more rounded and because of that the bowed slightly too. I tried it out on two of them and welded them together to see how it would look.
Crap is how they looked. At this stage I could have spent time trying to straighten and mess about but I decided to cut my losses and got hold of a fabrication shop (pentland precsision engineering) and they said they could 10 metres for £150.... Or if I supply the metal cut into strips they would fold it for £85, much better. For a 2200mm x 1250mm sheet of 1.2mm its £48 so I bought another sheet and cut 8 strips at 50mm by 1250mm for them to fold, saving £17 and leaving me with a sheet 1250mm x 1800mm, What would you choose?. There's a tip for anyone looking to get some metal work done, provide the metal yourself and save a fortune.
Whilst im waiting on the guttering to be done I decided to clean the light surface rust and spray a weld through Zinc primer on the upper body.
Once I had done that I made a start on the drivers side , where the window panel meets the lower half of the van. I wanted to try and stay focused on one bit of the van at a time but as I have nothing else to do regarding the roof until the guttering is made up I decided to make an exception. I mentioned this part before as one of those bits I never realised was bad until I stripped the van.
(quoted from earlier in my thread)
This side is also the worst around the swage line for rust, here's a close up from the outside.
And the same area inside
It doesn't look too bad outside but the inside is all completely rotten. Here's a crappy mspaint cross section to show you how they look.
(end quote)
Looking back at it again you can see it doesn't look too bad form the underneath or outside.
Unfortunately its another story inside
.
It seems that water has been lying in that channel inside and then eventually rusting its way through the spotwelds.
Lets get this started.
I decided to replace the whole length of the van in 280mm sections. The body bows out slightly in the middle so using shorter sections can account for that. I made up a repair section, the bottom lip will be 12mm and the upper 15mm with a joggled edge taking the lip that you see down to 10mm. So I cut a strip at 27mm x 280mm.
My folder managed to get an even fold on the shorter piece.
Then used the joggler.
A little bit of tweaking and tapping I got a nice repair section waiting to be fitted.
I forgot to mention that once I had cut the rusty section out I drilled 4 holes for spot welding the lower lip and I also painted the rust converter/primer inside. I also sprayed more weld through primer on the repair section.
I used the mig to tack it into place for convenience.
I still need a lot more practise with the tig but you can see here that it leaves a lot less weld to dress up.
Couple of minutes with the grinder and job done, well, 1/8 of it anyway.
Next piece, same as before.
*grind, grind*
I done another 3 sections when I started to wonder if it would actually look OK with filler on it. I didn't want to jump ahead a stage but just before I left for the night I thought I would put a quick skim on filler on a little piece as a sample of how it may look when finished, just to reassure myself.
Not too bad, remember this was only a quick 5 minute test piece, I will be sand-blocking this section much better when it comes to that stage but I felt quite happy about it.
This is as far as I got with the repair sections this weekend. There will be about 4 more sections to make then its a curved section at the back which I will hopefully have a proper shrinker/strecher by that time to help me with.
Stay tuned.....
