Welding woes

After the exhaust removal trip to Brighton I took the decision to purchase a welder to rectify the situation, rather than acquire a new back box. I decided on this course of action because I've been meaning to buy one for ages, as welding is something that I'd like to add to my skill set.

After a lot of reading and eBay searching, I ended up purchasing the SIP MigMate 105 - Basically this is a welder that has 6 power settings, with a maximum welding current of 105 amps and runs on the small CO2 gas bottles you can get from places like Halfords. This should, apparently, be fine for most work on the bus, although I am a little worried that it might be a bit underpowered when it comes to thicker chassis sections, but that remains to be seen. Fortunately for me, it came with 2 masks, a bit of 0.6mm wire and some gas, so I could get straight to welding.

SIP MigMate 105 - A fine welding companion for a novice

From what I'd read, and heard from other people, the main thing I needed to do to get some welding ability was to practice, lots. Therefore I went onto migwelding.co.uk read up and watched a few of their tutorials - I also used their handy calculator for working out the power setting to use on a given thickness of metal

With this in mind, I invited my friend Rich round to help as he'd told me that he did welding for his year 11 work placement. This seemed like a good plan until it transpired that he'd never done MIG welding, only TIG. Oh well, we had fun with a few little bits of box section steel I had lying about. Rich was actually still pretty good, where as I, in comparison was very poor. This was not helped by my welding mask, which was neither head mounted nor arc reactive. This meant I kept losing position when I went to weld. Suffice it to say after much practice, and a few tips from Rich, plus a long discussion about whether you should actually "push" or "pull" the weld (In the end I seem to go with "pushing" it), I was able to do what could loosely be described as welding.

So, I now felt ready to tackle the exhaust and it's mild steel make up. First off I whipped off the remaining bit of tailpipe, which proved to be somewhat troublesome to removed. A vast number of 13mm sockets and spanners, assisted by copious amounts of WD40, eventually had the blighter off. Once in my garage and safely on the work bench I set about getting a good welding surface. This involved me and a wire brush attachment for a drill. I cleaned up 3 specific sections:

- The pipe that bolts on to the manifold
- The area surrounding the hole that the above pipe goes into on the back box
- The exhaust mounting bracket - This was in order to provide a good earthing point (and will come back to haunt me later)

The broken exhaust sections

Cleaning up the input pipe

During this cleaning, I ended up having a health and safety issue. Now, when using high powered wire brushes, I think it's prudent to be well protected - I always wear gloves, safety goggles and for general protection from flying red hot metal, some sort of thick jumper. Ironically it was this jumper that caused my injury. Whilst holding the back box up to grind it down, the wire attachment got caught on my sleeve, wrapping itself round and then attacking my wrist, causing a minor, but quite painful injury. The interesting and brain teasing part of this is, that if I wasn't wearing the "safety" jumper then this wouldn't have happened. I have been musing over the pros and cons of the jumper ever since.

The health and safety issue

Anyhow, with the metal cleaned up it was time for two jobs, the first being to fill the hole that had rusted through, just above the pipes entrance to the back box. This was a fairly simple "fill it with weld job" and seemed to go fairly well, even with my atrocious welding skills.

A bad photo of the filled hole

Second up, and far more involved, was welding the pipe and the back box back together. Starting on an initially low power setting, I progressed up to what was still a fairly tame setting, and at this point, my circuit breaker decided to trip out. So I set off on one of many trips to go and reset it. Now this was both strange and annoying, mainly because I'd actually looked this up, and seen that the MIG welder required a 13 amp circuit and the garage circuit breaker was at 16 amps. This problem persisted, meaning I had to use a power setting that was too low, combined with my lack of skill to produce some terrible welds (see pics below)

My terrible first attempt at welding

That said, it seemed to be quite strong when I finally gave up bodging it, so I set about re attaching it. This was a success, certainly in comparison to the painful removal job. Once on, I set about driving the van about. First trip was a cycling trip (yes, again) where Vanessa and I met friends at Windsor Great Park - Seemingly this was a success, as we had a nice peaceful journey and there was no sign of metal scraping along the tarmac.

Manifold flange

Successfully re-attached back box

So for a couple of weeks I thought I had succeeded and congratulated myself on my welding prowess. It was only when I was giving the van the once over before our camping trip in Essex that I noticed all the welds had broken, and the exhaust, once again was just held on with friction. Not again I thought!

With my new fast action back box removal skills, I quickly got the back box off and back into the garage. The next day I decided to attack the welding again. I chipped the old welds off with a hammer and chisel and then set about trying to weld it again. This time I did two things different, in order to stop the circuit breaker kicking in:

- Weld during to day so I didn't need all the lights on the garage, thus preventing some current draw.
- Put the earthing clamp much closer to where I was welding, on a well cleaned piece of metal. The previous earthing point of the bracket didn't seem to have been particularly solid, and I suspected this might not be helping create the arc.

Second welding attempt with revised earth clamp position

This proved to be successful as I was able to run the welder at a much higher power setting. As a result I seemed to get a reasonable weld, with some degree of penetration. They certainly looked much better anyway, so I refitted it to the bus and it seems to have been fine since, and our little trip to Essex was completed without any drama. That said, I am keeping a close eye on it now, and just waiting for some death cracks to appear in welds - But hey, if it does come off again, it's just another excuse to practice welding, and with owning a 42 year old vehicle, it's a skill that's going to become increasingly necessary.

Improved second attempt welds (visually anyway)

Previous Blogs From Jon Ladley:


Split Screen Desire - The road to true love is never easy


Vans in the News and 19 Windows


My 27th Birthday and an AA Recovery "Low" Loader


Pushing the button...


Too low?