Ladder, that is funny Brought back memories of our youngest daughter when she was dating her now husband who had a Tahoe jacked way up sitting on 33s... She had to actually jump up to get in the thing lol!!! She is tiny, maybe 5 foot wearing high heels

 

Hey that's darn good for your 1st shot at it.

I've got a little Lincoln 120v mig with an Argon/Co2 gas setup. It's great for sheet metal work and will weld up to 5/16 steel with a couple passes.

I've mig welded miles of wire so I'll share a bit of what I learned. Variable wire speed and heat controls make a big difference in how well you can dial in a mig welder. Variable wire speed is more important than variable heat to dial a mig weld in, so chose that first if you get to chose. I think my Lincoln has 6 heat settings and variable wire speed. That works fine for the lightweight welding it was designed for.

Wire thickness and hardness makes a difference too. Play with them all. We'd use soft thin wire on sheetmetal when building car bodies, and thicker wire when building chassis out of 1/8" - 1/4" steel. Softer wire is easier to grind and make a welded part look seamless.

I've had a lot fun and made some pretty cool stuff with a mig welder. Fixed more broken stuff than I could possibly recall too. They are an awesome tool to have.

Oh, and use #14 filters. It's a lot better to not learn the hard way that you'll burn your eyes with a #10 doing just a little mig welding. If you start off with and get used to a #14 you be fine welding all day long and into the night and almost no one will want to borrow your helmet and get it all sweated up

 

We've had some crappy weather this week so I haven't had time to bring this thing back out of the garage... But hopefully it'll hold off tomorrow enough for my to burn together some seat tracks. Have it all bolted together for my Cadillac seat swap, and I'd much rather have them solidly welded... Couple different metal thickness I'll be dealing with, so it should be fun :P At least the entire seat track unbolts from the seat, so I'll be able to dig in from every angle and put a bead on every contact surface, and not worry about setting the seat on fire lol

 

That's looking great. I'd weld it everywhere I could and leave the bolts in place. Looks to me like it will be stronger than the factory mounts.

 

I could very well do that, but there's one spot where the bolt is actually in the way of letting the seat move forward and backward like it's suppose to. I have to raise the seat an inch or so in that one spot in order to clear the bolt and get the seat to move in it's full range of motion. I could probably take just that one bolt off in that one spot after welding and leave the rest in place.

I may flip another bracket around now that I can weld it in, because I wasn't able to just bolt it in place where I would like to have it.

 

Put the welder to real use for the first time today with the aforementioned seat track. Some of the welds didn't come out super pretty, but they should be solid!

Welded top and bottom along all edges, then hit it with some paint to keep the rust away.

 

Looks good to me! I built my entire blazer using a Hobart 140 running Flux core that I bought on Craigslist for $350. I have since upgraded to an ESAB Rebel EMP 285 that cost me almost $3k but that doesn't mean it made me any better of a welder lol!

And just for fun here are a couple pics of my first project I am doing with it after owning it since September. I have somehow acquired 4 grills so I decided to make a Santa Maria/Rotisserie out of one of them just because why not.

Uprights


Handle cut and welded into a useful shape


And a mostly completed but not finished rotisserie apparatus!

 

All done with a flux core

 

Very cool!

Got the freshly welded together track all bolted in this afternoon. Cleanest thing inside the truck now lol!









Caddy seats are so comfy, especially with the heaters I installed into them

 

Lookin good