How to MIG Weld (THIN) Sheet Metal (Plus BONUS Content)

on this episode ac designer garage we're going to show you how to mig well thin sheet metal coming up all right guys here's a few tools we're gonna have for this project today you're gonna need a roll of two inch tape of some sort uh a good scribe when we lay out our panels some sharpies i i really like these uh these milwaukees here they're called ink saws or something i guess you call i don't know they work really good i think they work better than a sharpie does yeah these work really good new tape measure need a blow gun to cool our welds with of course hearing protection uh got these little roll locks i like these i start with a 60 especially on the the wire welding stuff it seems the the welds seem a lot harder than usually when i tig and stuff so we start with the 60 and finish up with the 80. you need a good cut off wheel wheel of death make sure you're careful with these these things will hurt you bad this one here is a 35 thousandths it looks like the thinner the better on these just be careful when you're cutting with them but this takes out less material and it's a lot a lot easier and i'm gonna link all this stuff in the description these are a paint stripping wheel and these things work awesome they're four inch you can put them on like your uh your d walk grinders and stuff it's a little air one or four and a half inch but it works great it strips the paint off i'll show you here in a minute with it it strips the pound polishes don't remove any metal or thin it all out and stuff or get it real hot so i'll show you it i really like these but i'll link these in description and here's a little 90 degree grinder for the roll locks and stuff we'll put on there and all these things i'll link in description i got an amazon affiliate account you know it helps out a little it gives me a little percentage of whatever unqualified purchase so if you'll help the channel out just go check that stuff out and uh i put it in there to help you guys be able to find it one place but here's our subject today this is the old fender i got to swap me off of 68 c10 and uh what we're gonna do today is i'm gonna cut this marker light up i like like without the markers i just don't like a lot of stuff i am gonna leave the the c10 emblem on the back but i like to get rid of these corner markers kind of like the 67s came with but i'm going to show you how to cut this out weld it fully up and metal finish it and show you how to weld these holes up where the little four drive emblem is all right what i'm gonna do here guys instead of a lot of people do this and this not wrong there's a million ways to scan a cat this this the way i do it seems to work out really good some people cut a piece out that's basically the size of the tail i put it in here and weld it there's nothing wrong with that it's strong and everything the the only there's two things that i don't like about doing things this way it's any time you lap any kind of metal we like to butt weld it so i'm going to cut all this out but if you lap metal anytime you have two pieces of metal together you have a chance for moisture and rust to start and the other major thing is is when you go to weld metal and stuff you really need to hammer and dial it out and i'll show you real quickly how okay this is just a little demonstration of basically what happens when you weld metal together so when you you weld these two pieces of metal together it's going to shrink and this is basically what the metal does it it kind of just pulls it down in the center like this so what you got to do and now if you have it double lap lap right here you can't hammer this out good so if it's like this you can come on the back side of the dolly and you can basically run the length of your weld and hammer it stretch everything back out because when you when you do weld it shrinks in ever everywhere you have a spot weld so if you butt weld everything you can go around the whole thing and just hammer and dial it and get everything back out everything good and smooth to where if you just lay your metal in here that double layer of metal you'll never stretch it out enough you won't be able to hammer that that's just the benefit like i said there's nothing wrong with doing this i just like to try to get my stuff metal finished good enough i mean i'm not perfect at it but if we can get it good enough you don't have to put near as much body work in it now this fender has a slight dent here that i'm not going to mess with right now it's a crease right here this it's almost an eighth inch low in the deepest point i'm gonna hammer dolly out later so you just cut this out when you get this out we'll just take this flip it upside down lay it on here and just scribe around it and when i cut it i like to cut it just a hair big so we can file it to it because you don't want no more gap than you can get by with on this the more gap you have the more problems you have with it warping and stuff so i try to get this thing fit really tight and you ain't got to worry about blowing through and stuff it just welds up faster and it just finishes better all right first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to take our paint stripping wheel here and just clean this area out about right in here just to give something good and we'll come back and grind it with a just clean it up and then we'll go clean our piece up over here that we're going to use the patch with and get all it ready all right you can see what kind of finish that this does it does a really nice job it polishes it gets a little warm now if you're doing a huge panel you'd want to take your time because we were not grinding and doing this type stuff with warp metal too so try to get but this thing don't don't get it hot don't throw sparks it don't take any metal like material away from it it just does a really nice job it don't put really deep gouges in it so i highly recommend these things and i think i can't remember it it was under 40 bucks for a pack of five of them so now we'll get ready to lay it out and stuff and we'll get ready to cut this piece out then i'll show you how to just plug weld these spots there's nothing trying to cut like a little small circle here to do these you take forever but i'll show you how to plug these and back it with a piece of copper and stuff and get a good finish on that also here's how i usually do them there's no rhyme to reason to the shape i just like to drop down about a quarter inch and when you do it this way you don't have to have all your measurements perfect i mean you really don't have to measure do this when you just take it off and lay it down and scribe around it so i just i just get me some straight lines that are similar to it so all right now we'll take our cut off wheel and go in here and just cut this out and i'll show you how to transfer it over to your patch piece oh [Music] hmm [Music] uh make sure you mark the top of this so when you go to lay it out on on your uh replacement piece here that you know because it's cut a little different but what we want to do this hole now is uh 35 thousandths bigger all the way around for the thickness of the blade so when i got to lay this out i'm going to come up probably i don't know probably close to an eighth inch all the way around make it bigger and would just file it and fit to it but i may come in here sometimes when cutting it'll cause some distortion so we'll come in here with a hammer dolly and try to get this as straight as we can before we start welding all right now we're going to clean up our edges and stuff on our piece we're getting ready to lay out for our replacement piece so i just use that 80 grit on the roll lock to do this [Music] all right that should be good enough there i'll show you how we layer out all right what we do we lay it out we're gonna find our top side so we're gonna make this the top so i always just throw me a t on that so i don't forget make sure all i do is just flip it over and i'm gonna leave probably uh i'd say a eighth inch around give us enough room to get it fit to it real nice i'd rather have no gap if we can help it but there's still be some so i'm gonna when i mark this i'm gonna mark up against it but the width of the pin is probably pretty close to the gap i need so i'll i'll make some little reference marks here to make sure i cut on this side of it and that way we'll know where we need to cut we don't end up cutting too much off i mean if you cut the wrong side and you get gap i mean it's not the end of the world but because they like those little clip things that go in there and it puts a gap and holds them and stuff and those are okay but i found that i get more warpage on my panel if i use those with gap it will burr on that so i try not to have any gap i like tig welding works a whole lot better without gap so i try to pass that along on the mig so that looks pretty good so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go on the outside edge and know that's where i need to cut because i get doing this i'll forget and i'll end up cutting the line out but i should have left them on the room over there but i can grind that off and uh like i said we'll just grind up to the line and then we'll stick her in there and see how she works now you can use several different ways to cut this i i'm fortunate enough to have a stomp sheer i work for years and years and years with just 10 snips and you use that same cut off with that we cut it out of the fender with and cut it and stuff but i have stalks here so i'm going to use it i can just have it done in a second but like i said you can use cut off wheels tin snips whatever you want to use they all work same some of them just work faster so see i left a little line on there this stomp shears do make life a whole lot easier so what i do is i just i just put this line this outside edge of this line to where this end of this table ends right here and it just chops it off so and that's it now we'll grind it to fit the hole over here all right i'm gonna lay this in here and see how we fit in from see it's still the panel's still a little big but that's good because we can slowly work it back to fit have a real good tight fit now before i i really start fitting this nice i'm going to put just a little shape this has just a little contour to it and like this is dead flat so i'm just going to basically bend it over my knee and get it pretty close like i said after we get it welded in we can hammer dolly a little a lot closer to a little more fine tuning but we'll take the grinder in here and cut this slag off or the shavings on the excess and then we'll try to fit it up you can either grind this to fit this or this to fit this it's just whichever i may do a little of both so i can square these this has a little hump in it so i may do a little of each to get it to fit right but goal is to make that thing fit basically like this right here not have any gap so we'll see how we do [Music] all right now i'm gonna try to bend this let's see see it's got just a little that may be too much but we'll set it up here to see we can always just take it out but you can use anything to shape metal leg hammers it don't matter but yeah both of them seem to be have a little that may be twisted a little bit but we'll try yeah see that has just a little too much the peaks height it picks up and these are down so we got to take a little bit out the other thing you gotta do is just you'd be surprised how much this stuff moves with just a little bit of effort it's looking like if i take this line completely out that should be enough but we're just going to go about halfway through this line and just keep slowly working up to it [Music] [Music] yeah we still got a little too much peak in this well this has a little den in it so i'm just going to what you want even though this is dented in i'm going to make this panel here fit this and then we'll come back and we'll hammer that radius back into it this still looks just a hair long so i'm going to totally just take this line out so it looks like from here to here it's a little long here you can see as it fits down in there real nice so we need to take a little off this end here not a whole lot let me clean up in here a little bit all right all this all the way around looks pretty good except for right here yeah let's try here and here looks like it needs a little raise this way so we're going to put a little okay guys that's pretty close i'm gonna and i use tape i don't use the the magnets i mean they work okay but it seems like it makes the arc want to wander real bad with magnets especially tig welding mig does too a little bit so i just use regular old masking tape hold it up get you a couple tacks peel it off and go with it but that's that's pretty decent i mean it's not perfect but it's pretty close probably should have used the file that last time around instead of that but it'll be good enough let's get her taped up and start doing a little arcing and a sparking all right we'll go over my welding setup before i i start welding uh this is my old millermatic 185 i got this thing when i was in high school uh probably 1994 or so that's when i started uh playing with the wire weld i know everybody's machine unless you got a millermatic 185 i think the new ones i can't remember the new ones even have these type settings but on my machine and the best thing to do they got you flip this i got so much junk on it but you flip this open and it tells you like for 18 gauge or whatever the start out settings you can tune it into it it's best to get whatever thickness of metal you're welding and just put you a couple test strips i like it so on my machine i put it on two and probably around 70 we'll see how it does you want it to hot enough to sink down and lay down nice and flat but you don't want to build up or blow through but it's just something that you got to work with and on my machine i run a 75-25 mix a carbon dioxide and argon you just make sure when you turn these things just barely crack them open then you can run them out but i run anywhere from 18 to 20 cfh cubic feet per hour it works good for me but what we're going to do first is i'm going to tape that piece in there just put a piece of tape here and a piece of tape here and get it good and centered where i want it and you got to be careful i go bare-handed when i first start doing this because there's nothing better than the touch of your finger to tell if something's level not you want this thing to feel level and what you can do you can take it flat and i'll grab one a flat blade screwdriver after you get that first tack just feel it and then just hold back and just put your tack there then you can take a screwdriver and you can kind of bridge it and work it as you go all the way around but you just what we do is i do about spot on each corner or so and then i'll use my air hose and get it cooled down to the touch to bare hand it takes a while but you don't want to warp it so i'll go around there and then after i get it going i'll do a couple of zap zap zaps and cool it good with that then move over zap that and just keep working around till we get this whole thing completely welded and then out with the wire welding you got to grind it down and thin it out a little bit with a tig you can just hammer it as it is but we'll get it weld around a little bit we'll hammer it and get it closed and just keep working it's slow process i'll try to speed it up so don't bore you too bad but here we go forgot to grind my ground spot so you can see me do that [Music] so [Music] so like here i can feel your finger down you can feel like now it's low so it's hitting that what i do is i get it up there now my fingers down here and right here and we'll just keep feeling then we'll come in here and just tack it don't get your hand there because that heat will travel quick but just be very careful doing it basically i'm gonna get this level and throw attack on it all right got that one and if you want to just run around here and find another spot that may be level right here that's all you really need to do just like a two second tack you don't need to hammer on it a lot i'm going to cool this because the heat will start traveling a lot that's good [Music] all right what we're going to do is after sometimes when you start welding these it draws it a little bit so it'll pull it and all sudden your patch will get a little tight so what we'll do you don't want to cut straight into this because you'll get a bigger gap i like to cut it at a 45 degree angle like this and it don't leave near as much gap to have to fill up so we'll try that and we'll just keep bumping this to right now that's how all this here fits pretty good [Music] a lot of times i use a screwdriver to push up the metal on the back side [Music] after you get a it tacked all around you can come back every half inch or so and do it and cool it off all right now we do is go all the way around as well just keep going and cool and going cool and don't get too much hurry check it every night in because you'll warp it if you get too carried away with once we get fully welded up we'll come back and grind it and hammer and doll it and touch up anything we need and we should be done [Music] all right guys forgot to tell you the wire size when i was going over the welder this is what wire size o23 is what we run in this thing the good thing about the o23 is it keeps from building the welds up so high and it don't carry near as much heat so you're not going to warp it so you're going to do a bunch of this sheet metal bodywork rust repair stuff you need to get you roll this 023 and change your tips and rollers in your machine i'm not sure how yours are set up but i just want to show you this before i [Music] forgot [Music] so [Music] all right now we're going to go with the flat wheel just to knock the tops off that that air will ain't fast enough for me so we'll just use this another thing we'll watch out for is those uh grinders will create a lot of heat so try to cool in between [Music] so [Music] [Music] uh [Music] all right guys now we got a ground almost completely all the way down we still got a little more finishing up and finish grinding on but what we're gonna do now is take the hammer and dolly and just go around our edge where we weld and it's going to stretch everything because right now it's like the valley is where the weld is is when you weld it it shrinks down like as you hammer it'll come up so you put your dolly on the bottom and hammer right down in top of the v with your hammer it stretches everything back into place and you go all the way around it a couple times and it'll get pretty close so here we go and everywhere you saw me going i was basically uh following the dolly up and down on the dolly on the back side so you just you get used to it it comes pretty easy after a while but but it seems like it's coming out pretty well still got this dent that was in here before we might get to it later something i just mainly want to get this area here pretty close and we're going to grind a little bit more on it all right now we're going to finish it up with this paint stripping wheel does a good uniform area on it then we'll put a little guide coat on [Applause] all right i'm gonna show you just on a little spot of this i'm not taking this body panel this far but this is to show you how you can get stuff pretty close metal finish you get a regular sanding block and you can use anywhere from 120 to 180 you can use daikum to paint it but the only problem if you need to grind and again dycom gums up the roll locks pretty bad so get you a wide tip sharpie and basically you just paint the whole thing the area you're going to do what it'll do to show your low spots and your low spots what you can do is you can come behind and pick it up with the hammer and you come back do this again and you just keep blocking it or if it's a high spot and it takes all the sharpie off you can knock it down you just keep working it back and forth all the way across and it'll show you highs and lows and you can get them pretty flat like that i mean it's just like doing bodywork with guide coat and uh on your primers but i'll give you a little short example i'm not gonna metal finish this fender you get that get your sharpie on there and let it dry and then you just block down through here and as i sand you can see the the high spots here and generally on either side of your well it's going to be a high spot your well to be a low so that just tells me that that i need to hammer from the back side put my dolly up here and uh bring this section up or you can if these feel high to you you can hammer these down until basically you want to be able to sand this whole thing until all the colors are gone i'll see if i can hammer this spot right here up and uh or one of these in here and see see if you can tell the difference i'm going to hammer this one right here now let's see if any of that sharpie will disappear well i was off a little bit because i hammered this up you can see where this came out so what you do is you just gotta slowly work work it up keep blocking it off this could actually be a little high so we'll take it down when it's high you put your dolly on the backside but that's basically how you do it that's what they used to call pecking and piling but that's how you we don't use files we just use sanding blocks but all right guys one last trick i want to show you when you're feeling uh small holes these here probably a quarter inch or larger i mean you can feel pretty big holes with this method i have a piece of copper you can take like a piece of one inch copper tube and like get your plumbing section it like loads or something smash it this is just a big flat piece we got and uh your wire weld will not stick to this copper make sure you're wearing a glove on this because copper is a great heat sink and it will suck the heat out of stuff but this thing gets hot so basically what you want to do if you can see can you yeah see the copper back there you hold this back behind it and while that's back behind it you'll go around the outside edge and like zap zap that that's that that to the middle and he just break the copper off and it backs it real well and it it keeps from shooting wire all through it just helps basically dam up the weld for you but that's one of the last things we're going to do i'll tell you i think it turned out out pretty good on there for wire weld most time i tig weld this stuff but i want to show you guys not everybody has a tig welder and this can be done with wire away and just got to take your time keep it cool and stuff but all right we're going to get plugging these well a little arcing into sparking and we'll be done all right we'll take our copper and back the hole and just weld it up and cool her off [Music] all right we're going to plug the other [Music] hole real quick i'll uh grind them down real quick for you so you can see it [Music] tell you i really like these little things here like i said i'm gonna link these in the description you'll love these things you just got to be careful on like really sharp edges that's the whole thing it'll cut them loose but man if you're gonna clean up something flat like this or just strip paint these things are the ticket all right guys hope y'all enjoyed this little trick here like i said you can use this for rush repair or shaving stuff like we did here we showed the marker light that was in here it's gone or shave animals where you want to do it once you learn these few little skills here it's going to take your time you guys can do anything at your home garage so hope you enjoyed it god bless we go

Channel: AC Designs Garage

Views: 244,226

Rating: 4.8436928 out of 5

Keywords: how to weld, learn how to weld, welding, how to weld metal for beginners, mig welding, sheet metal, how to weld thin metal, welding stainless steelel, rust repair, welding for beginners, welding for beginners mig, mig, how to mig weld, how to wire weld, how to cut sheet metal, how to weld sheet metal, how to weld on a car, how to weld on a car safely, car repair, chrisfix, chrisfix it, diy welder, weld at home, learn to mig weld, how to weld at home, how to grind welds

Id: S6spZdzqFxg

Length: 39min 25sec (2365 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021