Welding With Gas

Over the last month I made good progress on the cab and was well into my welding apprenticeship. In fact there is so much to write about, I think I will do a welding post trilogy. We all know that the third post will be the happy ending where I slay all the welding ogres and ride off into the sunset in my truck with Daisy Duke. This post will be the first installment and all the others will be the middle one. I know - more than three you say. Traditional trilogies are three books but many authors now start a trilogy and extend it to four or five books - must be due to inflation.

There are many different types of welders as you would expect. I happened to borrow a MIG welder from an acolyte that was taking an indefinite sabbatical from welding. The G in MIG stands for Gas - like you should use it. However, I had all the confidence of the ignorant and I told my friend that I would pass on the gas, since I was sure one really did not need it.

The first real test came when I put in a patch panel on the cab. The fabrication of the panel went well and the tack welds were excellent, but I hit the wall with the butt welds. As exciting as the term sounds, it is not fun – I was dumb and dumber with a Barbie welder. The truck sheet metal is very thin and when you get it red hot and don’t know what you are doing, you burn a hole through the metal – this is called a blow out. I managed to get a few blow outs the size of Rhode Island.

I was taking one step forward and two steps backwards for most of the afternoon.  At some point I had to stop welding and prime the panel so it would not rust. Well primer shows all the flaws and to my chagrin there were lots of tiny holes in my welds.  Suspecting this was not good, I did a shout-out on the Stovebolt.com forum.

I explained my welding dilemma in a highly technical truckarian manner and got some good advice. At some point an alert reader suggested that we all look at a post on the Ford forum about welding. Now you have to understand that Stovebolt.com is a Chevy forum and it took more than a healthy dose of bipartisanship to cross over to the other side. If Congress started welding they might get a few more laws passed.

It turns out this was the Holy Grail of welding. Chuck_in_Durham had taken on a mission to write a step by step guide on DIY welding. His primer was a godsend and I am frankly inspired to advance my welding skills.

In his first lesson he pointed out that you really do need use the gas.  In simple terms, hot steel is basically a slut and will hook up with any oxygen molecule that saunters by. And, we all know that when iron and oxygen get it on, we have lots of little rust babies. So, the smart guys figured out if you bathed the molten hot iron with an inert gas it would act as a condom and prevent those hot and bothered oxygen molecules from closing the contract.

Once I finished my biology lesson, I immediately went out and purchased my own welder and a man sized cylinder of Argon/CO2 welding gas. With all this knowledge and specialized equipment I was feeling a little evangelical. At a dinner party the other day I was compelled to have all our guests experience welding fist hand.

Everyone loved it especially the women. There is something about suiting up with thick leather gloves and controlling a 100,000 volt electric arc to create a molten pool of red hot steel. I might have to start a religion.