Today the weather cleared up briefly so I pulled out my Mig welder to try to weld the fridge steel. I'd tried that before with poor results. With the DC stick welder on 20A with 1/16th electrodes I could weld the fridge steel but had to move quickly or the steel would just melt, leading to very blobby, ugly, gappy welds that had to be filled in with Bondo.
Using the welder I did manage to weld the fridge steel to a leftover length of steel from the other day. The weld was blobby and ugly as if I'd used my stick welder.
Going further I tried dragging the wire across the steel and managed to do some fairly random and worthless welds. Sometimes I burned right through the steel despite moving swiftly.
Turning up the wire speed and turning down the amperage didn't help much. I still had blobby welds and sometimes so much wire shot out that I had glowing red wire sprinkled about the place.
After a few more holes blown in the steel I came to the conclusion that the fridge steel is pretty much unweldable. Somebody more versed with welding pointed out the white deposits around the weld and said that was a signature of zinc. How they managed to mix zinc into the steel, I don't know but it seems that fridge steel contains zinc. It was not zinc plated and the flux core wire contained no zinc either.
Yesterday I measured the interior of the window apertures and asked the local steel company for prices of steel sheet. As I stood back and looked at the back of the bus today I had a revelation. Instead of fannying around, trying to trim the steel to fit nicely inside the window aperture, it makes more sense and looks more professional to just slap a sheet of steel over the entire window aperture, squaring it all off and then weld into place. Just to hold it in place, I might just screw it into place with self drilling screws to start with.
Meanwhile the postman arrived. I have multiple small solar panels that don't have connectors on them. Thus I bought a pile of cheap connectors. I can use them to connect to a cable with an SAE connector. I'm not really seeing much point with small, cheap solar panels of putting expensive connectors as the amperage is very low.
So, tomorrow I'll have to get some 32x16 steel sheet in 14 gauge. That should solve the problem with the steel.
Today I asked the steel people, using the measurements I had then. Now I want to try using my new measurements. If I remove the nasty fridge steel and grind the fridge steel welds flat then sandblast to get rid of any rust followed by spraying with rust killing paint, then I screw the new steel to the door in order to keep it nicely in place, I can sand-blast around the edges then weld and paint. I'll use galvanized steel like the rest of the bus. Once the outside steel is welded in place I can rivet the steel panel back on the inside that was screwed on before.
If all that goes just fine and there's no reason on earth why it should not, I can work on the upper door window then the windows on each side of the door. The aim is for a windowless rear to the bus.
But aren't you lucky - two blog entries today!
No comments:
Post a Comment