I don't have a lot to show you about the welding yet because I don't want to show you my welds but when I get done I will give you close-ups, as close as a pinhead. When I started plug welding I only welded half the plug weld holes to keep the heat down. A 3/8" plug weld hole takes a lot of weld. If I did it again, I would go to a 1/4" hole, because when I welded the screw holes I had really good penetration into the supports. I could see the weld was all the way through most of them, and the others were far enough into the supports that they will hold. When I welded the first half of the plug weld hole, I welded on the outside edge of the support area, I figured it would keep the pans tighter, although I don't think it made a lot of difference. Anyway, I welded all the plug welds then I pulled every other screw, welded those holes and that's how I alternated my welding. Hope I explained this okay. The end result is the screws must have really formed these pans because they are just as tight after welding as they were when they were screwed down and I feel good about that.
This is the third support back, I guess around where the heels of your feet would be if you were sitting in the back seat. I previously cut the floor off the top of it and I saved that piece of metal to either reuse or use for a template. This support has rust in between the rocker panel and the support, so I'm taking this support out. Before I took it off the body jig, you can see where I spot welded four strips of metal the same thickness as the floor pans. I'm not taking any chances on anything moving on this. It only takes a few minutes to spot weld them in and take them back out. In a few days I will be taking this support out and showing you the bracing I used before so I can do it on the rotisserie. I'll show you the whole process.
A guy has to have some garage scenes thrown into the montage. I like to look at them and so do you guys. In this one I'm bringing the body jig out and getting ready to put the rotisserie back in. In case your wondering, that's Buster supervising.
I used 3 floor jacks and the bride to move it to the other garage. I used to unbolt all of it but now I just take it in one piece. When I set it up to put the body on it, I have it bolted to the concrete floor with a bolt in each corner so nothing ever moves in the structure of the body...Buster is still supervising.
That's me pulling this into the other garage. The bride got out of a little work to take the picture.
You've probably seen this before. When you weld on these bodies the chain hooked to the swivel on the rotisserie allows me to move this body about one inch increments, where if you have holes in your spindle you can't put it in any position you want to, unless you have a gear type spindle. To me it's priceless.
You're looking at the bottom of the supports underneath the car. I'm filling in any screw holes that weren't completely full of weld so there are no holes left or indentations in the support. When I welded these I used full power on the welder. 100 on wire feed, 10 on the voltage, and 23 on the regulator when the wire is feeding out of it.