More Chassis Construction
/Spent the whole afternoon continuing with the chassis build. Starting to get the hang of this whole measuring, marking, cutting, filing, welding process but it takes forever all the same. I'm seriously considering buying an electric chop-off saw.
Anyway, here are a couple of pictures to show how I'm getting on now. All pieces are tack welded in place and amazingly all my longitudinal, lateral and diagonal dimensions are virtually perfect! So far anyway...
As you can see, I've added 6 more tubes to the 4 I did yesterday. Almost all of these needed slight angles filed on the mating surfaces which took up a lot of the time today. I will investigate an alternative method but I am not prepared to give up accuracy to gain speed because I want nice tight metal to metal joints with small tidy welds where possible.
Another angle. I nearly made a blunder today with measurements but found it before any welding took place. I had somehow managed to shorten the whole car by one inch. I recommend that you measure as many things in as many ways as possible to catch these potential blunders. Keep checking diagonals and double/triple check all dimensions.
I am having some problems with my welder and its lack of amps (only 100A) when welding this 2mm thick tubing. The problem is that I just can't get enough heat into it to make the weld flow properly. If I preheat a tube then weld it is fine but I can't preheat full-size tubes, especially on a wooden board so I think I'll need to hire a welder when it comes to seaming it up. I can just about get away with it for tack welding but I'll be left with a bit more grinding to be done later. I have switched from Argomix to CO2 gas to get better penetration and this has helped but I still have to hold the trigger down longer than I'd like to build up enough heat and then I get an high weld.