Welding Will Test Your Mettle

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.

Prime the Hood

Uncle Remus, Uncle Remus, tell us what happened this week in the Hillbilly Garage. Well chrin, I worked all weekend on that ornery 1954 Chevy truck and by golly if I didn’t prep and spray primer on the hood and get the front fenders mostly done. Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, Yippen Farcheesy and Roll Tide. Mostly done is okay as it is progress, but I am going to be so happy once I start getting things really done.

When I was in the construction business there were a couple of sayings we commonly quoted. One was “straight like Apache arrow”, the meaning is self evident and it is a useful saying when you are doing leveling and plumbing tasks. The second one was “smooth like mamma’s xxx”. Several options can be used to fill in the blank, they all highlight the posterior aspect of the feminine form. This saying is often used to describe finely finished work that has a smooth and highly polished surface. It takes years of hands on experience before one qualified to make this statement. The “smooth like…” saying crosses over from construction to the automotive vernacular - body work is a tactile sensory enterprise in any industry.

It feels like I have been working half my life on the front fenders, finally they are almost to the smoothness point of the aforementioned saying. Spray on the primer, sand the primer, run your hand along the surface, repeat until it is “smooth like…”. Only one more coat, I promise.

The hood has been another epic piece of work. Both Stephanie and I have sanded our fingers to the nubs, working to get it prepped. As a last resort we used rust eating chemicals to assuage our rust malaise.  The use of chemicals is a double edged sword, they eat the rust, but getting them to stop is problematic. Water will wash off the chemicals but then the hood starts to rust all over again. Since I haven’t been able to prep and paint in one weekend, the pristine hood on Sunday is covered with a fine patina of rust by Saturday. It is a never ending cycle.

This weekend I finally neutralized the chemical cocktail, sanded the hood to bare metal, and sprayed on the etching primer - it was sweeeeet!  But wait, the paint was acting up.  I have read about the problems one can encounter when on the spray paint road. To wit: fish eye, blistering, crazing (my personal favorite, in fact I want it), pin holing, orange peel, and mumbly peg. Uncle Remus you forget to include “sagging”? Why my oh my I did skip that one, cause that’s what I gots – the sags. Technically speaking the coefficient of paint adhesion was exceeded by the verticality ratio to the volume of material that was incontinent with the reduction additive. In English - I sprayed to damn much paint on the damn part. Not to worry, at this point it can be sanded out and all will be well in the briar patch.

Still it was a glorious weekend and progress is progress. Another saying I like is: Man with respirator on is one thirsty mechanic.



Bear With Me

Hey, I greatly appreciate that all y’all are interested in the truck project and have subscribed to the blog. Last October the Huntsville Times solicited writers to apply for the 2012 community columnist position. I sent in a couple of my posts and was pleasantly, no greatly surprised to find out I had been selected. This means that I get to publish a column the first Sunday of each month. Writing a monthly column at first seemed daunting, but now that I have done one, only eleven more will not be enough.

When the editor called to let me know I was selected he said he liked the truck stories, but  some of the other editors wondered if I was going to do all the articles about the truck - could you write about some other things as we have a broad and diverse base of interest. My quick reply was "Yes, of course, exactly my plan", but we all know what the real plan was. You can let me know next month if I can.

If you are interested in reading the column it is online a www.al.com in the Huntsville opinion section. Here is the direct link.

http://blog.al.com/times-views/2012/01/truck_restoration_attempt_spur.html

The new writers are introduced in the "New Year, New Voices" column.

http://www.al.com/opinion/huntsville/

Thanks so much.