When restoring a 57 year old truck that has spent the last ten years outside in northern Minnesota, one expects some badly rusted areas. The text book remedy is to cut out the rotted area and weld in replacement sheet metal. Now I don’t know about your image of welding, but mine is a big automotive shop filled with parts and machines, men wearing masks and gloves, with sparks flying. It is a loud and noisy business with big burly men that have beards and tattoos. Quite frankly I am more than a little intimidated by it all.
My one welding experience was in high school, a friend’s dad had a welding shop and one day he let us play at welding. After I got the hang of it, I was using scrap metal to weld together a fine piece of abstract art. Did I say “scrap metal”? It turns out I had picked up a key part of a metal bending tool and welded it in the middle of my masterpiece. Needless to say when his dad came back to the shop and saw what this knothead had done in the name of art - well go back to the image of big burley men with bandanas, tattoos, sparks flying, and now mad as hell. He took an acetylene torch to my project and that was the end of my formal welding training. I gave serious thought to entering a seminary.
With the top of the hood primed, the next step was to flip it over and work on the bottom. Anytime you turn something over to work on the underside, you are bound to find some surprises and this was no exception. One of the hood supports had a serious case of rust rot. It looked like SpongeBob SquarePants and I thought about selling it on eBay until I remembered that people only bought Jesus and Elvis images.
I was out of my league on this but I put on my big boy panties and followed the instructions in the manual. The first step was to cut out the malignancy - nurse hand me the cutoff saw and the impact hammer. Another successful rustectomey, Dr. Sherman.
The next step was to fabricate the replacement sheet metal part. Necessity is the mother of invention, since I didn’t have any real sheet metal shaping tools; I got my wife’s rolling pin, my vise grips, my daughter’s curling iron, and my neighbors Susan Summers Thigh Master and started shaping the metal. After a few nips and tucks I ended up with a plausible replica of the replacement part.
We all tell our children that you have to practice in order to develop a skill. I actually had been practicing my welding several weeks ago and did a few practice runs before attempting the real deal. Just look at my practice lines – sweet. If this project doesn’t work out I am going to Pigeon Forge and open a shop where I weld people’s initials in old car parts. In fact I am taking orders now, my specialty is capital I’s and lowercase l’s
The last step is to weld the replacement part in place. This is were I feel like I am in a cooking show, you know when the chef puts the stuffed duck in the bottom oven and then takes the fully cooked bird out of the top oven. What they don’t show you is the several hours of welding, grinding, wire brushing, and welding some more to finish the job. After all this I am ready to challenge Cat Cora on Iron Chef in the rusty metal battle.
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