Real-World Welding Examples

This video provides a little tour of some of the small jobs that I've done with my welder over the years

This is my 1990 F-150 half-ton. I live in the rust belt and I keep this vehicle oiled, so body rust is not a problem

But there was one little spot that got the better of me, as you can see right here

Originally there was some wall-to-wall carpeting on the floor and there was one spot that was holding moisture under the carpet and it caused this rust hole

You're actually looking right through the hole here to the dirt underneath, but the welder made quick work of the repair

After cleaning and removing some of the loose and flaky rust, I welded a patch of new metal in from underneath the floor

The blobs you see around the perimeter of the patch are spot welds, so it's just where I've welded for a second

A little blob and then a weight and then another little blob and then weight and then another little blob

It's a technique that works very well on sheet metal like this

As a final step to this first initial phase, I've just grinded the surface flat

So we've got a good solid repair, but it still doesn't look all that great yet

I don't like auto body filler, so I do all my filling with solder, which is what you see here

Now it looks quite ugly at the moment anyway, but I've cleaned the metal, heated it with a propane torch

and gone over it with some lead-free solder to just more than fill that little depressed area in preparation for the next step

which is grinding and sanding this smooth. So here's the completed repair, all flat and smooth and ready for some primer and paint

There are a few dark spots, as you can see, and those are actually small depressions

Since this is a floor, I didn't bother filling that with any spot putty

but if I was doing this repair on an area of the vehicle where I could see

then I would just apply some of that red-colored spot putty, sand it by hand

and you've got a really great all-metal repair, ultimately thanks to that welder

This is a motorcycle backrest that I made back in the early 1980s

It's actually the first time I ever used a MIG welder. I was working in the Rides Maintenance Department at Canada's Wonderland, which is a big theme park up here in Canada

and I had the run of the maintenance shop when my shift was over, so I built this chrome backrest

It's just made out of mild steel, fabricated it in the shop to fit this motorcycle, and then sent it off to be chromed

So, probably one of the fancier projects I've done with welding. I designed and built this bike rack for Canadian Home Workshop magazine

It's one of many projects I've created and published in that magazine over the years

This is made from 3-quarter inch steel pipe and 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1

bottom pieces apart the right distance and then there's the uprights that are

being welded in place. As I said, full instructions for making this project

later on in the course. This is a close-up of the welds in the bike rack

This is actually one of the more challenging situations to create a

neat weld where two pipes are meeting each other, but it's entirely possible

You'll learn all about doing this in the course and this is what a solid and

deeply penetrating weld looks like in the finished product. This little part

sitting in my vise is for a bread maker we've had. When it came from the factory

there was just a clip that was joining the butterfly type piece to the actual

shaft that's sitting in the jaws of the vise. That loosened up and it broke

eventually, so I just popped it out, brought it to the shop, put a couple of

spots of MIG weld on either side of the shaft where it meets that butterfly

piece and it's worked well for years after that. It's just a perfect repair

It didn't take long to do either. This is an eight foot wide snowblower that I

refurbished. It was just dumped in the bush somewhere. Nothing much was working

on it. A lot of parts were seized. The welder came in handy in a couple of

situations here. I had to rebuild the whole mechanism whereby the chute could

be swiveled hydraulically from one side to the other and my MIG welder came in

handy there for welding lugs onto the outside of the chute so that I could put

a cable on it that would grip it and move with the cylinder. More

recently I had a little mishap with the snowblower. I had a small tree after

blowing out a neighbor's laneway and it caused this sort of corkscrew thing, the

thing that moves the snow into the center section to get blown out

caused that to be broken. But about an hour or so with the welder and it was

all fixed up as good as new. This is a metal stair frame that I built with my

son for a house he has on our property. It's made out of two inch black iron

pipe. We have some offset metal platforms here, metal treads. They're covered with

cherry wood now in the final installation but this is what the metal

frame looked like after we had it all welded up and we're ready to take it to

his place, to Robert's place. Here you can see the frame in the shop and the cut

outs there in that vertical piece we had that done in a separate shop where they

do this sort of work. They used a water blast method to actually follow a

design that we made to blast through that quarter inch thick steel and it did

a great job. The crispness of this design is really amazing. This is a

circulator pump in a hydronic heating system I installed at my place and

there's the custom bracket I made in order to support it. It's at an angle to

the joists, a little bit of a particular situation and a little bit of mild steel

and some work with the welder and came up with quite a nice bracket here. This

is a gate that I made also from black iron pipe. It goes along with those

stairs I showed you before and a railing as well but this has been made entirely

from black iron pipe, from black iron pipe fittings and then also from a

little bit of plate steel and some 3 quarter inch thick mild steel rod. This

is a close-up of the hinge of the gate. I've since installed a grease fitting in

there. Kind of overkill really grease fitting on an indoor gate but it

sure does make it swing quietly. It's perfectly silent when we have that

grease in place. This bird sculpture is made out of number nine annealed fence

wire so pretty flexible, fairly thick and you can cut it in pieces and and weld it

together for all kinds of shapes if you feel like getting creative. Needle nose

vice grips do a great job holding these pieces of wire together. You just don't

want to use a pair that you care too much about because the end as you can see does get kind of fouled up with little bits of weld. Two of my boys are

heavily into weight training and they ended up breaking some regular equipment that they bought so we strengthened it. You can see the gussets

and little extra pieces we've added here and there to make it stronger and it's

just worked absolutely perfectly. There's been no problems. A few years ago I decided I wanted to install a hand pump, a deep well hand pump on my

household well. We have an electric submersible in this well but I just

wanted some a backup for pumping water by hand if necessary but the well casing

was not high enough. The pump would have been too close to the ground so I bought

a chunk of well casing and used the welder to weld it on and down here you

can see the bead and it extended the height of the casing just just right for

this well pump installation. As I mentioned before welders are handy for

keeping older vehicles going. This is underneath my truck and it's the exhaust

system and the regular hanger had pretty well rusted out so I added a u-shaped

chunk. It's actually a u-bolt for exhaust system u-bolt clamp but I just welded it

on to the existing holder and just got quite a bit more life out of this

exhaust system for a very little work. This stainless steel measuring cup is in

our kitchen and the handle broke off so I did a little bit of quick mig welding

to re-secure the handle on. This is the inside view you can see the penetration

in it. If you flip it over you can see the outside. The weld is not that neat

I've since grounded it's not sharp or anything it's a little bit blobby but

it's hard to work with thin material like this you really only have a second

to give it a zap and to to make the connection so it's lasted years like

this and we'll probably get many more years out of it too. I could show you

many more projects around my place that I've used my welder for this is the last

one I'm going to show you in this video. It's a it's a fence post pounder so this

is for pounding t-shaped steel fence posts into the soil. It's a two-inch pipe

and I have welded solid steel shaft into the top part so you can see the top end

has the welding bead on it and then I've done some plug welds in the side so

boring holes through and just welding right through the hole into the plug to

the edge of the pipe