Here is a pic of one of the welds (requested by illwood), I woulda posted more but dial-up takes forever to upload pictures. Here are a couple pics of the STB installed... Lemme know what you think
thats sweet i thought about making my own but i can't weld and don't have a pipe bender. I wasnted to do mine with square tubing so it would be different and probably 1 of a kind
Nice bead on the gusset plate At the joint of the 2 tubes. . .uh. . . well, you certainly didn't skimp on the filler rod. J/K, I'm just busting on you. (Welding tubing is a ****, 'cause it's thin and you don't want to burn a hole through and it's not a linear motion with the torch) But here's from one DIY guy to another I'll have to post pics when I finish making my wheel spacers.
yea my dad taught me how to tig weld a few months ago, and i tell you that its possibly the most useful tool you can have....i made my shifter handle for the car, along with assorted other random non car related things.......plus its fun as hell.....nice job on the STB man, those welds are lookin pretty damn clean.....welding the tubing as illwood said can be a pain in the ass because depending on the thinkness of the tubing, it could kink, or make a hole very easily.......
thanks for the compliments guys. To answer a question a couple of you had, I started from scratch: 8 feet of 1 1/4" tubing (have extra left over lol), 6 feet of 1" tubing, a square foot of 3/16" steel, and a scrap of angle iron. I made templates out of paper for the brackets on the strut towers and cut the top of the angle down an inch and rounded all the corners. Once I had all 3 brackets bent and bolted to the car, I cut approximately the length of tubing I needed and just bent, fitted, re-bent, re-fitted, etc... (with a 5 minute walk from the metal shop at the college to the lot where my car was, this got annoying lol)...then tacked it all together on the car thanks to a friend who lent me a portable welder, took it off and finish welded it. It was a decent amount of work, but it woulda been much easier if I coulda had the car in the shop. I took a few ideas from engine bay photos on stangnet and in 5.0 mag to see how things were supposed to be. All in all I spent $70 (and about 2 weeks or so of spare time, which is very little time toward the end of the year in college, as I'm sure alot of you know) on the project, with tubing left over
I used MIG (Lincoln SP-2000 -200amp semi-commercial - my dad's welder). I am in the process of learning TIG now, cuz tig is waaay better for sheet metal.
yea i use tig...its so much better for most types of welding not to mention if you ever decide you (or anyone else) wants to put a roll bar in your car, it has to be welded with a tig welder for it to be NHRA legal.....you dont have to get the cage certified until you hit like 8.99 or something, but the techs occasionaly check the welds, and you can tell a difference.....i didnt think you'd be able to, but when the guy that sold us the welder showed us a MIG weld and a TIG weld side by side, there was definately a difference
