12-10-2017, 08:46 AM
So, I finally got around to doing something about this. I did ask around about getting it fixed. Was steered towards R H Davey welding (Daveyboy from the GTI-6 club) who apparently has fixed quite a number of these but they're all the way down in Southampton. Also approached some local garages but in the end decided to have a bash at it myself.
The main problem is I don't have a MIG welder. I only have an little inverter arc welder. All the advice is not to weld anything thinner than 3mm with an arc welder but I like a challenge and have managed to weld 2mm steel before with it. Set to DCEN so as not to put too much heat in to the work and only weld in very short bursts for the same reason and it seems to be OK. You don't get very pretty results with stop-start welding like that though.
As planned I partially drilled out along the crack and wanted to drop little spot welds in to each drill hole. The first one went quite nicely but much of the rest wasn't quite so neat and I built up too much weld that needed a lot of grinding back. I was just thankful I didn't burn through the mount point!
I realised when looking at this pic that I'd missed a little bit of the crack in a couple of places and went back and filled it later.
After that I fixed in a bit of 2mm plate. If I was doing it again I wouldn't curve the plate up the sides of the mount so far as it made it very difficult to get the right angle to weld it in. Although I got it welded firmly in place the results were embarrassingly messy ....hence no image of that!!
For now there are no more creaking/clunking noises from the O/S tower area and fingers crossed it will stay that way.
The main problem is I don't have a MIG welder. I only have an little inverter arc welder. All the advice is not to weld anything thinner than 3mm with an arc welder but I like a challenge and have managed to weld 2mm steel before with it. Set to DCEN so as not to put too much heat in to the work and only weld in very short bursts for the same reason and it seems to be OK. You don't get very pretty results with stop-start welding like that though.
As planned I partially drilled out along the crack and wanted to drop little spot welds in to each drill hole. The first one went quite nicely but much of the rest wasn't quite so neat and I built up too much weld that needed a lot of grinding back. I was just thankful I didn't burn through the mount point!
I realised when looking at this pic that I'd missed a little bit of the crack in a couple of places and went back and filled it later.
After that I fixed in a bit of 2mm plate. If I was doing it again I wouldn't curve the plate up the sides of the mount so far as it made it very difficult to get the right angle to weld it in. Although I got it welded firmly in place the results were embarrassingly messy ....hence no image of that!!
For now there are no more creaking/clunking noises from the O/S tower area and fingers crossed it will stay that way.