TIG Butt Welding Part 4.How I get my repair sections fitting well before welding Tips and Tricks #49

[Music] hi this is tripp and welcome to my blog i'm finally back so what have i been up to well i've only been shooting lots of video for you guys so there's at least six good videos coming up for you to watch all on the old panel beating and paint spraying and you know you're going to love it you're going to absolutely wet your pants so what's all this about this is my first collaborative project with a guy called chris k liu runs a company called outline displays thanks chris wonderful vintage neon sign full length feature episode coming up on this how i made it from start to finish but at least the next six episodes will mostly feature card body work but going to involve the sign because the sign is made at exactly the same materials as a car would be if you were repairing it to the same steel the same fillers same primers and the same paints so that's why i've done it you see so i've got plenty of good stuff for you guys to watch hope you enjoy the video in the last video i showed how i used my old bedford binacle as corners for the sign the whole point of the video is to show how to weld up unwanted holes really started to pay attention to the profile of the panel now and i've sharpened out what i want to make my cut you'll see the cut comes in far more round here the main reason i've done that is because if you look at the edge of this panel we really have got a very sharp right angle and the panel is a very definite sort of flat across the top we're turning it around to the other side we can see that the angle is far less severe far less sharp it's very very curved and what it seems to do is it drops off gradually into the flat on the top it's quite hard to see it on the camera but it does actually sort of dive off gradually here so what i've done is i've bought the line all the way back to there because i know that that's going to be on the same flat level as the other side so to cut this out there's a few different tools i use i could use a reciprocating air hacksaw or i could use a cut off disc so this is a three inch by one millimeter disc on here i could use that to cut it out just roughing it out of course or i could use a pair of aviation snips now the thing with aviation snips is they work fantastically well but you've got to be a little bit careful when you're using these you don't want to end up twisting your work deforming the edge that you're cutting you'll notice that when you're using your snips the piece that's removed will often curl up if you've got the snips to turn the other way around then your work will try and curl up on the edge so you just want to make sure that you've got the snips around the right way i'm going to use this 20 millimeter belt sander to cut right up to the sharpie line it's got a 60 grit belt on i also use this 10 millimeter belt sander sometimes for more intricate work so that's more or less cut out now what i often do is i put a radius on the corners i do that if it's not a particularly brilliant fit the panel and what that tends to do is it stops the inaccuracies from getting worse as you go out into that point also i notice that you get a lot of heat concentration on the point as opposed to a radius so that's the reason i do that two reasons i give you there i've noticed as well that there's a lot of pressing marks in the back of this panel so if i flip it over you'll be able to see or you probably see there already in the sides it's extremely uneven and it actually looks better on a camera i must admit that it does in in in the flesh but that's extremely uneven and i'm going to really struggle to get that to marry up against a completely flat panel and not have some kind of joint line afterwards so what i might do is i might just dolly that round now and try and get that a bit flatter but i'm still going to struggle whatever happens getting down to the nitty-gritty now i really need to summon up the courage and start cutting into this the actual curved section changes shape radically about here so i'm thinking about taking it back to around about there cutting that off we don't need to fit that section because there isn't going to be a benefit to it is there and that will save us welding all the way up there across there up there which will save a lot of work a lot of heat distortion for not much benefit if we did fit it so that's the plan so what i'm going to do is cut this off first so shorten this i probably welded that hole up wherever it was along there probably welded that up needlessly but that's how these sort of projects go isn't it so what i'll probably do is cut that and then i can align this up by just lining it over the top and i'll cut a piece up to that line out because every time i cut something out i run the risk of cutting too much out that will be a disaster so i'm going to just cut to that line out so i'll remove a section from there then i can start overlaying this and using this as the template [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] hey [Music] hey [Music] real point of what i'm showing you here is how i get the panel or the repair panel the repair patch whatever you want to call it to fit as well as i possibly can there of course will be many other ways other people will approach the job and this isn't to say that this method's any better than theirs but it's just the way i do it myself so what i've done is i've cut as much as i possibly can out of the box so this box i've trimmed it back as far as i can so that the repair panel so this would be a repair panel whatever you want to call it this fits as well as it possibly can when you overlay it on top of this what i've done is i've probably got it just to within a few millimeters or a couple of millimeters actually here you can you can just see a gap opening up so i nearly went too far there um what i do if you can get your head around this this will really help so this is this is how i've worked out and i've worked this out through trial and error lots and lots of error i can assure you with that so that may bring you some comfort if you mark this so you're going to basically use this piece as a template so you're going to mark round and leave a nice mark on the panel underneath the problem with this is if you just do that all in one go what will happen is you will end up invariably with a gap somewhere so if you're wondering why you keep getting a gap or try and explain it as best i can and as briefly as i can the material is around the millimeters thick so it's about 0.9 millimeters if you want to be a bit more precise and the problem is you've got to realize that when you mark out it's going to move when it drops down into position so what i'm going to do is i'm going to mark this side first and then i'll get this to fit flush here the reason i'll do that is if i mark the top around so if i marked all the way around there and all the way down there and then i cut all the way around what's going to happen is as soon as i line this up here because this is this will be the first place i'll line it up i'll line that so that's butted up so that's dead level it means that the whole panel will shift that way by 0.9 millimeters so if i've if i describe the line and cut it dead to the line it will mean that it can't move those 0.9 millimeters to close that gap up and i won't be able to get this flush so that'll be the first thing i'll do is just literally scribe down here cut down here that'll move over that way that means that this now will be in the correct place for me to then scribe that around cut that out afterwards and then get that to fit that will mean that it will fit flush all the way around so if you ever had the issue where you've scribed it all the way around then it hasn't fitted very well it's probably for this reason i just get my sharpie or a marker pen i've polished this up previously with the surface conditioning discs so it's nice and flat now just mark around there like that i allow that pen to just dry off grip the panel back into place now taking real care to make sure it's exactly where i want it to be [Music] [Applause] [Music] i've made this cut that fits nicely there as i said when this drops in flush so that'll drop in flush like that if i line this top up flush this drops down okay so that drops down this is now too tight if you see what i'm doing so i've made that line incidentally i thought i'd just say always try and do everything at a right angle to the plane that you're doing it on so if that's your if that's your flat i appreciate that if you're doing something that's curved all the way around you're gonna it's gonna be a lot different from this but if it's quite flat there then do that as a right angle because when you drop it down it's gonna stay parallel if i drawn this at an angle dropped it down i could have ended up with a wider gap or a tighter gap to see what i'm saying so drop that down so i drop that down so the top is flush what that means now of course is the gap that we had here which was perfect a second ago is now overlapping so all i've got to do now is sharpen that up [Applause] [Music] just get a bit of scrap like this just cut that edge off because that's a razor sharp edge all i'm going to do is cut some squares out of this to help grip up the flush side now so just cut some squares out that's absolutely fine i'll hammer those out flat so they're completely flat again you can get grips that have got flat sections that swivel and they're quite good actually for doing this job i have found i mean i haven't got any myself i have found that if you're trying to grip up something that's a little bit curved you can end up in a situation where those little swively bits put a high spot in your panel and i always do this so i just cut a couple of strips up and i just put that one from because they're so thin they sort of compensate for any inaccuracies in the panel or whatever and they sort of bend rather than the panel bending they kind of compensate a little bit so this is a real fiddle so what i'll probably do is just trap that like that and then i'll get this i'll try and slide that in between probably end up dropping a lot in a second there we go like a true expert and so i can now kind of grip this up probably got a bit too much pressure on the jaws just let a little bit off it's a faff all this is a faff but it's worth it so that's held now that look that's looking a little bit gappy again and that's because the top's overlapped so we've bought it up but we know that when that drops back down again it's gonna be pretty much in the correct spot so just just try fitting it i'm just making sure that i'm happy with where everything is what i'll do now is i just release it again sharply around there i'll cut that round and then we can go to the next stage so we'll have that that and all the way around there fitted nice and flush we've only got to address this far end it's a first proper trial fit and it fits pretty well actually so i'm going to be really fussy and talk through how i could probably improve it slightly but to be quite honest with you if i was working to a time scale this would do i just crack on and weld it now but i can just show you what i can do to improve things slightly so let's start at the bottom so this bottom edge here this lower joint fits pretty well tiny bit gappy on the corner can do absolutely nothing about that now so i'm just gonna have to live with that this is pretty good so this joints fine all the way up to here and on the corner section it's flush so it meets nice and flush there the radius is very slightly tighter on the actual panel box than it is on the section that we're letting in but i can live with that there's nothing that i can even pick up with my thumb but once i've welded that and grind it off it'll be absolutely fine you can see this corner has just picked up slightly on the edge so what i can do is just simply bend that down because it fits flush on the corner there's no point making it any lower because then the corner won't meet move into the top section so we can see that we have got a slight gap there and then it goes tight and then we got a very slight gap afterwards so to draw this gap in slightly what i need to do is file a tiny little bit by hand off this here that's what i'll do next so i'll just file that and what that will allow is it'll allow the panel to close up slightly closing this gap up around here again got a slight gap there but nothing much i may find that as this comes around like that because it's going to come round it may tighten this up but i'm not bothered about this because i'm going to cut this off we'll cut this off and make a new piece of metal that i'm going to let in that will match the contour of the new piece that we're letting in because obviously it's completely different just so i don't lose the position or where i need to take the material off with the file i'm just going to sharpen it along there so i know exactly where it is i'm actually just using an old body file here [Music] filing the outer radius more than the inner so if the outer radius had been on the repair section i could have filed that but it's far easier to remove it from here than it is a concave shaped you know can't go very well what you don't want to do is go half a leather at it you just want to take a little bit off and then just keep trial fitting the panel over and over again and just by holding it up i don't know whether you can see that but you can you see that that's pivoting yeah so that would indicate to me that i can still afford to take a little bit more off just there so i'll take a bit more off [Music] it has to tighten it up here as i suspected it would maybe just a tiny tiny little bit more so i've taken off as much as i feel as i need to along there i have got a very slight gap still around here but what's happened is because because i've taken that off there and this has been allowed to come round the panel is actually grinding out here stopping me from shutting that up even more so i'm going to take some material off here don't forget we're losing this anyway so i can't make a mistake by taking too much off and i think what that will do is that will allow this just to come round that fraction more and just tighten that gap right up so that it's virtually non-existent and then what i'll do is i'll address this situation with this corner set up like i said this radius here is is uh tighter on the box than it is on the section that we're letting in this sits higher here so i think if i tighten that up that'll drop that down and then that'll make that more equal there so that those two corner sections are exactly the same profile or closer than they are now i've got it fitting quite well now i could improve things but i think any more improvement would be just needless time spent next thing i'm going to do is remove this and make a template got a thin piece of aluminium here which is perfect to make a template out of very easy to cut of course i'm just going to grip this into place [Music] so rather than spending all that time rough cutting out i can just use the template on all four corners of course i'm not going to cut right up to the line i'm just going to cut you know just inside but it's a good guide as to where i need to cut it out just to get myself started so that i can get the next corner on and then all i need to do then is just mirror image that like that so i can lay that on there like that and i can just roughly scribe around like that cut it just slightly larger cut that one slightly smaller and then you know i'm ahead of the game i'm gonna spend hours working out exactly where to cut it i thought what i'd do is i'd try and pack as many hints and tips in as i possibly can at the four corners this is the one that probably fits the least well so i thought i'd start here because this means i can sort of build in some more sort of hints and tips the first thing i'd sort of say is i've had to use these heavier grips i've got these lighter ones but unfortunately the lighter ones don't negotiate the depth of the panel so about to use the heavier ones because i've used the heavy ones which isn't such a huge deal but it's meant that the weight of the grips has distorted the panel slightly so what i've done to help alleviate the problem is i've put a block of wood under there that's helping to support that and keep it more level so that's the first thing i sort of like to say so obviously what i've done is i've gripped it up to get the best fit i possibly can and use as many sets of grips as i can all the way around to try and hold it in the position i want it the next thing i'm going to do is tack this in all the way around there are no hard and fast rules on tacking things like spacings between the tacks or whatever but judging by the amount of mail i get on the subject of people tacking things around saying that well the panel was absolutely flush when i tacked it around trev but then when i came to weld it it obviously moved this would indicate that you're not putting enough tax you can't put enough tax range if things are going to try and misalign once you start wilding obviously the more tax you have the less chance there is of things going adrift so what i've done is i've started off by putting two clamps quite close together i'm going to tack in the middle so there's absolutely no chance of that moving or very little chance anyway they're going to stay pretty well aligned in between these two clamps so that's the first thing i'm going to do so analyzing the fit on the panel on this panel and your own panel what you need to do is analyze where the gap is the tightest fit so wherever you've got a real nice tight fit make sure that's where you're going to put your first tax i got a bit of a gap here so this certainly wouldn't be the first place that i'd start attacking i'll explain more what i need to do is get my wiring rod i'm going to hold the wiring rod over the joint and i'm going to aim the tungsten at the welding rod what that will do is that will create the arc to go straight straight to the welding rod a little bit of bead off right on the joint and that little bead of filler material there will then fuse the two pieces together i'm gonna just give it enough time so that just penetrates and that'll do it's really really a very quick process it doesn't really matter if it looks horrendous afterwards it's gonna look quite blobby there'll be bits that we need to grind off before we do our final well none of this really matters what we need to do though is we need to get our tacks to keep the panel nicely aligned so that's the sort of real goal of what we're trying to achieve here [Music] i'll try and get attacking around here somewhere next this needs to be pulled in with a clamp get that fitting a bit better around there it's quite gappy here and i think if i can get this to move over a bit that'll close that gap up slightly it's quite tight round here though i've released all the grips because this corner does seem very very tight um interestingly you can see that the panel has overlapped here so it's slightly overlapping because of the shrink that's happened here so this is heat shrank and this is drawing the panel in which means this obviously has been amplified because it's having a leverage effect and i can pull this out so i can pull that out by hand there you go we're back to where we started so what's kind of happened is it's moved it's moved upwards the whole thing's moved upwards and imagine if i'd welded it where there's that little gap so where there's that little gap there because we had a slight gap in the panel that would have pulled that gap right up and some more this would never have fitted afterwards it would have been we would have been in a horrendous situation there so i'm going to do because i've only got these two tacks here we've still got some sort of fluid action going on in the panel here so i'm just going to lift that corner and just put my little mini belt sander around that corner there just to take that corner off and that will let that corner sit really nicely in there because you see when i hold it out to get the corners to line up we still got a slight gap there so like i said mid course corrections so i'm just going to put the belt sander over that and then i'm going to put some tacks along here [Music] you can just see it almost just sits back in there i'll just show you something else before we move on uh people are always saying to me about grinding the little beads down um you know when can i when should i grind the beans today should i always grind them off every time before i punish or should i planish them first then grind them off this would be a good example here because we've got quite a bit of a blobby bead here if i put that dolly under that bead and i give it a bit of a tap with a hammer what's happened is because we've got a bead that's sat quite tall when i've squashed that down that would have spread that more than if the blob wasn't there so if that little bead wasn't there and i just literally hammered on the panel itself then it wouldn't have a great as great as spreading effect as it does leaving up there so again you know you've got to keep kind of evaluate everything as you're going along so that has caused that to spread ever since slightly it just sits in there so nicely now there's no there's no upwards motion now the planishing of that little bead there has got rid of that tension that was in the panel so that now sits as you can see i don't have to apply any any downward force to this panel to get that to line up so that's just something else that's a useful little tip so like i said i think i'm going to get some tacks in along here and that will hold that down or may even just continue along this top and this is the this is the sort of face that you're going to be looking at all the time so i suppose uh it could be a good argument to be how to get this right first before i go around then the rest okay so those two tacks in now what's happened what's changed like i said keep evaluating the thing i can feel most is this corner stuck out so it's very very flush here that is like exactly on the same level and that is up here as well but this corner here sticks out a lot almost the entire thickness of the panel as you can see so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just literally force this round [Music] [Music] beautiful beautiful and flush the other thing i've noticed is this little top weld here we have a situation where the little section is higher than the panel we're only talking a fraction here though so again what we need to do dolly from behind and then just give it a bit of a can hear you you can hear making contact hear that that's contact with the dolly underneath what that will have done is that will uh spread the panel out a little bit we've got our gap back and then i can simply just tap this down yeah okay really nice in fact i could probably improve upon that if i just put a little punch up underneath around about there just seems like a slight dip just there so that's what i'll probably do so on the inside of the panel now again supporting with my dolly from behind so we're underneath i'm actually going to go just the other side of the tack because if i put it on the tack i'll just be hammering on the tack will i so i'll just put that just under that edge and i'm going to just get a little bit of a tap if i can get the hammer in at this angle oh that's absolutely spot on i get one on this corner so we'll get this corner tied in so that can't move now again we've got a bit of a discrepancy on the exact height of both panels meeting each other and what it is you see is this actually starts curving away because this this lovely curvy shaped panel isn't dead flat like this is so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just put a little bit of pressure on the panel just to bring that down rather than bending this up because i want to maintain this lovely shape as much as i can and if i just give this a bit of a bend because we've got a little bit of a gap here if i put the tig on the end of course it's just going to melt a huge hole not only is it on the edge but we've also got a bit of a gap so what i'll do is i'll put the thicker rod in so i've got a bit of a thicker piece of welding rod i'll just put that in on a 45 degree and then i'll heat it up with the tig welder that'll form a nice blob and that blob will just melt lovely into that corner and give us a bit of a heat sink then because of the the actual weld will be acting like a heatsink and then i'll be able to just use the thinner mig wiring rod then the remainder of that gap okay so this is dead flush absolutely gorgeous of course what we're doing is we're looking for problems all the time just trying to identify what's wrong not what's right we can live with what's right um i don't know if you can see it on the camera but this panel here i just put a bit of weight on it it lines up better like that which would indicate to me that this along here is just folding out slightly so what i'm going to do is flip it over and just tap along that edge to try and bring this panel up so that it meets this flat section if i push the flat section down to make the uh little piece that we're putting in then what we'll end up with is a big dip along here and we don't want too much of a big dip there so my next attack is going to be here i'm going to put attack there it goes a little bit gappy on the corner so i'm not going to world where it's gappy i'm going to weld where it's a gas type fit so that'll be my next tack back inside the panel of course just give that edge a bit of a tap up i really am the wrong way around but i can't do it without getting in the way of the camera i'll try and do it from this angle just there nice one absolutely nothing to be concerned about with the fit anymore so what i'm going to do is i'm going to basically just grip all the way around and just keep continuing on with these tacks and then we'll start the welding process [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] well i've seen have a bit of a hollow there not really surprising this gap's completely closed up along here so let's just pull that in and i've got a bit of a problem there what i'm going to do is just give it a bit of a tap golly underneath [Music] what feels a bit better there's certainly enough tacks around there now to hold the panel in position and not not sort of have anything rising up unintentionally so i'm quite happy with that so what i'm going to do next is i'm going to get all my sections tacked in and then i'm going to come back to this and weld it all the way around i need to make a section that's going to go in here [Music] well thanks very much for watching i really hope you got something out of that the subject of my next video will be about heat distortion and more specifically the heat shrink effect from welding car body work because it's that thickness of material that really really suffers from the heat shrink effect and it's something i know that specifically plagues a lot of people have a lot of questions about this and i think if you understand the mechanics of creation behind it then you'll get a greater understanding of how to get past the situation not let it plague you any longer so that's going to be the next video but before i go i'd just like to say a huge thanks to everybody that's sent me emails over the last couple of months and i appreciate i have been away for a rather a long time and that's because i don't want to go on about it too much but because i started up a catering business in the middle of a pandemic so it's been extremely challenging but i don't want to talk about that really what i want to talk about is i want to just say massive thanks i really appreciate it guys i just like to say that there were bells on a hill but i never heard them ringing no i never heard them before till there was you bye for now [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] baby [Applause] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] here's johnny [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Trev's Blog

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Id: AhpPkksmI4c

Length: 46min 11sec (2771 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 26 2020