One of the skills my father taught me was welding, more specifically, welding with Oxygen-Acetylene, or gas welding. It was only basic metal welding, but it was a start. One of the first things I remembered welding was the rear axle lower tracking bar on my ’61 Volvo when it cracked on me. I really had no idea how to repair it at first, I thought I’d have to get another axle. I straightened out the two pieces, joined up the edges and fudged a weld on there. It held! I didn’t really do a whole lot for years after that, unfortunately.
Let’s fast forward to mid-2000’s – I needed an exhaust on my 240. I thought I’d be cool and put in a full 3″ exhaust, custom built. I bought all the pipe and bends and had to figure out how to make an exhaust. Out came the gas welder. I filled up the tanks and went to work. A MIG welder would have come in handy to tack things together but I didn’t have one yet. Long story short is it got done and I was hooked again. Welding and working with metal is where it’s at. I’ll be posting up pictures of the exhaust in the car section with links over to it here. After I rolled my 244 I pulled the exhaust and its in my 262C now. Love it!
After being in my then-new house (where we live now) I got a MIG welder, can run gas or gas-less. I’m running gas-less and have been since I got it, I keep telling myself that eventually I’ll get gas for it so I can weld stainless. I don’t seem to ever have a need to weld stainless. Go figure. I use good quality welding wire and that seems to mitigate a lot of problems people seem to have with gas-less MIG. After I learned to adjust the wire speed and regulate the heat depending on the thickness of the metal I’m working with it was easy. As much as any other tool in my garage, the MIG is one of the go-to tools. In fact, it made my Foundry project possible as much as anything else.
As with any other hobby, if you don’t advance and learn more, it gets stale and boring. That’s when I stumbled across the Gingery series of books. It was like I’d been struck by lightning. I knew what direction I was going. Now I had to have a mill and a lathe. I received a small bonus from work and the first thing I did was look for a something that might help me move forward and lo and behold – there was a mini-mill on Craigslist. It’s a great starting point for me and will make the next step in this road I’m on easier by reducing the amount of manual work I’ll have to do.
I have to have a lathe. I want to do some garage gunsmithing, make parts to sell for either the Volvo or Ishapore Enfields or other stuff. The main thing is to be able to make stuff and a lathe is very important to that end. I’ve started to make the bed, have the steel for that part, and now that I have the foundry and the start of an aluminum stash (and zinc) I’m moving forward.