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Old 06-16-2014, 12:08 PM
Maxakarudy Maxakarudy is offline
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Default Mig welding aluminium

Hi folks,
I thought I'd share a liitle job I did the weekend, a repair on an aluminium wing (fender). This was due to a previous bodge by a body shop many moons ago, who pop riveted and bonded it together. I had to make the repair panel for this wing and weld it on proper styliee...
My daytime job is fabricating signs, mostly in aluminium, folding panels then welding up the corners, grinding them up and sanding of the excess weld. We don't tig or gas to weld them up, for various reasons to boaring to into, mig welding is my prefered method, we weld mostly 2mm & 3mm ali.
So when presented with the dilema to tig or mig the repair panel, as I'm more confident with mig due to the super sophicticated double plus synergic welders I use, welding 1.5mm ali didn't put the fear of God into me.
I tacked the panel every 20mm then I ran the 20" of seam in 2 strikes, I was concerned about blowing it to bits, but I worried unecessarily, I could have done with a tad more power, but I erred on the side of caution (got scared really). As you can see the weld is pretty proud, but no abnormal distortion. After grinding the bead down, I blued the panel up and planished everything, just like normal, there was no weld cracking, although the penatration on the back didn't allow me to get it as nice as I have would liked, but that was due to not being able to grind the weld off the back due to the inaccesabiliity of getting inside the panel, I could get a dolly in, but that was it, also the last 8" was completely inaccessable due the A post. I'm very happy with the result, but would not consider using it all the time, just thought I'd give a go.

photo_1 repair.jpg

photo_2 repair.jpg

photo_3 repair.jpg
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Old 06-16-2014, 02:14 PM
galooph galooph is offline
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That's turned out really well - good skills! I've heard of people using mig on aluminium before, but never seen the results.
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Old 06-17-2014, 06:52 AM
Oldnek Oldnek is offline
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Nice job Martin, Did you use a spool gun for your mig or you running nylon line, I have a inverter mig , but not sure to bite the bullet and buy a spool gun or not. I have a tig anyways, but sometimes mig is twice as fast.
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Old 06-17-2014, 11:38 AM
Maxakarudy Maxakarudy is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Oldnek View Post
Nice job Martin, Did you use a spool gun for your mig or you running nylon line, I have a inverter mig , but not sure to bite the bullet and buy a spool gun or not. I have a tig anyways, but sometimes mig is twice as fast.
Hi John,

I use 1.2mm 4043 wire with a standard 3m torch with a Teflon liner, actually its only rated at 160amp, it's deliberately small so we can get into tight spaces. I haven't tried the spool guns, they look a bit cumbersome, but you don't have the problem with bird nesting at the wire feed. I have tried a setup with an ordinary inverter welder, but I wasn't happy with the controlability on thin stuff and the wire feed gave me problems, I had to bite the bullet and get a pulse synergic type (Lorch S3). The mig is all about speed, it counts for a lot in my sign business.
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Old 06-17-2014, 04:46 PM
rcv4 rcv4 is offline
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Nice job Martin,it looks like it didnt distort much,how did you clean it up?
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Old 06-18-2014, 01:10 AM
Maxakarudy Maxakarudy is offline
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Thanks Chad,
I hammered and dollied up the best I could, reading the file marks in the blue, then orbital sanded it with 120g disc.
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