A Blog About Land Rovers in Oklahoma
In this episode, I manage to get some good welds. Together with some bolts, I think the floor bed is installed!!!!!
Now I need to clean up the welds and cover the steel in some primer and paint. You know, to prevent rust, wink, wink.
I know this will rust again, I’m just hoping by the time it does, I’m on to another vehicle.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.
Yeah, these welds go to SEVEN. As Nigel Tufnel of the legendary band, Spinal Tap, says, “…but these go to eleven.” I turned up the voltage on my welder to get better welds.
I started with setting 4 wire speed and C voltage on my Lincoln Pro Mig 180 welder. Those welds did not hold. Drilling them out ate two drill bits and caused me to sharpen one of them twice during this ordeal.
So I turned it up to 7 D. Why the wire speed needed to be so much faster at this level of voltage is till a mystery to me, but hey, whatever works.
Hopefully these work. I am going to reinforce the welding with some bolts just to make sure any “flexing” of the body doesn’t sound like I just cracked the Big White Bus in half, when those weld break free. It will give me some piece of mind too that the floor bed will not go anywhere with all my gear strapped to it.
I also sorted out that I had my braces on wrong. This was why the bed was bulging in the middle. I don’t know how many times I went through how those needed to be installed and I still got them wrong. They are on correctly now and the bed panel fits SO much better.
That’s about all. I really appreciate two of my viewers who pointed out that the welds were not penetrating.
Wallace, who just recently acquired a Range Rover Classic and will be starting on his restoration at some point in 2025. And…
Trevor from Tumbleweed Garage [YouTube channel] who is restoring a Willys Pickup. He is doing a great job and I love watching how his mind works. He does a lot without any fancy tools, proving once again you don’t need to spend a king’s ransom to play with cars in your garage.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.
Well that was a waste of a weekend. In a misguided attempt to correct bad welding, I propose it is my ground. Turns out that was wrong too.
So we filmed a lot of wasteful effort to get the floor bed installed.
I received a lot of help from people emailing me and messaging me. The consensus, the welder is not hot enough. I need to turn up the voltage.
This is an exercise in frustration. My next video will be with hotter settings on the welder and hopefully some welds that stick.
I’m pretty sure the bracing is in the wrong place on the frame supports too. There is a bow in the bed that can only be explained by these braces being in the wrong place.
More on that in the next video too.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.
Today was a punch in the gut. My welds will.not.stick. I have no idea what is going on. I’ve tried several thing and I can’t get these welds to stick.
My goal this weekend was to get the bed installed and to move on to something else. Unfortunately this is a big set back.
I will have to investigate what is going on. Sort out what I’m doing wrong and hopefully get some welds to work.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.
In this week’s post I continue my work on the floor pan. This time it’s patching the panel wear rust munched it’s way through. I patched a roughly 4″ x 5″ piece and three holes. One was about the size of a quarter the other about the size of a nickel.
I made up a template cut it out for the 4×5 hole. For the smaller holes I drilled them out to make them uniformly round. This helped greatly with making the patches. The third hole I just welded shut by building up the weld to bridge the hole.
I had a bit of trouble getting the welder dialed in. I haven’t changed the setting but for some reason it the welder was being difficult. Once dialed in (set back to the original settings) I managed to get good penetrating welds.
Once it was all patched up I got some paint on every thing. I was also able to get some rattle-can rhino-liner/stone chip sealer on the Z bar. I still believe this is crucial to keeping the rust at bay for a few more years. I will likely put a bunch of seal sealer in there as well. Belt and suspenders if you know what I mean.
My next episode will be getting the cross beams installed. This will be a challenge I can assure you.
Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.
In this episode. Grady and I get the Z bar welded to the floor pan panel. After the debacle of last week was finally solved, we had some new tools and great grounds to work with. These allowed for our plug welds and our panel butt-welds to hold.
I also noticed I had the heat up too high on the welder. Once I lowered that, the welder didn’t blow through the panel. There were a LOT of welds. We went through a half tank of shielding gas. And in the end we ran out of gas. So next weekend I’m going to need to get down to the welding supply house and get a fresh tank of gas.
If you remember the first video we determined we needed to cut about an 1/8th of an inch off one side. It turned out to be closer to 1/4th of an inch when I finished. We used the pinch vise clamps, some hammering, and a lot of bending to get the panel flat enough to make good welds.
Grady got to weld quite a few welds. I think I need a second welding mask so I can watch his technique and help him to get better. He did a pretty good job after he got the hang of it. Its fun for me to see him engaged and wanting to learn.
We have 2/3rds of the sides on now. Our first task will be to get the last one welded on and to fit it ONE MORE TIME. We fitted the panel and I’m 92.6% sure the panel will go in cleanly and fit properly.
That’s all for this week.
We wish you all a very Merry Christmas.
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