longfellow

Yeah, I did those about a year back. They bolt on to the door hinges, but its welded on at the upper frame rail. Made a HUGE difference.

Ha thanks, I've been working on the car since november. Got into a accident and have been rebuilding the car since. I'm just now getting the motor back up and running after the rebuild.

This is what it looked like 5 months ago:

drftmark

For those of you with s14's who cut their trunk out...

Did you need to fab anything up to brace it? or just rivet a sheet of metal over the hole or what.

GSXRJJordan

I replaced a quarterpanel and didn't brace the trunk well enough, thinking that everything behind the strut towers doesn't really matter/etc...

... and I was wrong lol. The trunk area definitely needs to be braced. I'm going to use 3/4" square tubing to go from the strut towers around the 'floor' to brace it... eventually it'll make its way into this thread

I can definitely tell you that it needs to be braced though ~

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drftmark

Ok I am going to send you a pm

Otto347

Well I got the cart about 90% done, a few more welds and it should be up and running!

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duffman1278

Those welds look really nice.

They look like MIG?

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Otto347

Yes sir, thanks! (if only I could tig as well as I mig )

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blu808

That welding cart is badass.


One thing I wanted to say is that almost every car I see has no sort of intercooler/rad ducting. So here is a teaser pic of what I will be finishing up next week.

Proper ducting coming to a Turbo Ls1 s14 next week.

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fakts13

haven't posted on this thread for a while. looks like some people have been pretty busy lately . have some free time so i thought i'd contribute some okay fab work i've done since the last post.

custom exhaust for a lexus sc430.




i forgot to take pics of it on the car.......

i/c piping for a ma70 supra





a little vacuum manifold (first thing i ever made on a mill)



battery tray and tie down (tie down is the second thing i've made on a mill)

welds are kinda crappy since i don't have 1/8" gas lens or collets and the 3/32 kept wanting to drop






I still need to work on my welds

roco

savage work, the welds dont look to shaby to me.

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fakts13

thanks, my welds need to be more consistent. i can get some decent beads sometimes, but not all the time

duffman1278

How the hell do you guy guys weld aluminum so nicely?

I tried this weekend and I failed miserably.

I welded like a .05" thick piece of aluminum with my schools tig welder, and When I tried to get the puddle started like I would do on steel it just made a FAT hole in the aluminum and the aluminum was turning charcoal black around it.

Set the amps to about 65A and A/C, with the green tungston.

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Jonnie Fraz

Clean the crap out of it! Almost sounds like there was a coating on the aluminum, or that it was anodized.
The reason aluminum needs A/C is because it oxidizes so fast. Aluminum oxide is second to diamonds in hardness and take a tremendous amout of heat to burn it off. Aluminum oxide melts at 3632 F where as aluminum melts at 1220 F. The more crap you have on your aluminum the harder the A/C wave has to work cleaning it off. This can melt you base material before you burn off the oxide, and the base will not puddle.

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fakts13

what did you have the a/c balance on? try learning on thicker Al. it is much easier to not burn a hole through. .050 is pretty thin stuff for a beginner. if you could get closer to .090 it would be easier. also practice by doing padded beads (don't try to fuse to pieces together, just run beads on a single piece in the middle). also, do you know if the alloy of the metal is weldable? some aluminum alloys have a D grade for weldability.

duffman1278

Thanks for the suggestion guys.

I believe the A/C balance was on( I assume thats the diagram that has the graph of a square starting at positive then going to negative.

I tried .05 because that's the only scap aluminum we had lying around at the shop.

I'll have to give it another go then with a thourough cleaning this time.

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fakts13

try putting a/c balance at like 5 or 6 if it's a syncrowave

edit: duffman, just read your post about 4130 on the last page. i would just leave the welds, heat treating isn't something most people can just "eyeball". unless you can get the whole chassis heat treated precisely, i would just leave it, you probably wouldn't be doing any good using an oxy-fuel torch to heat it up and letting it cool down naturally, just let it cool down naturally after you weld and that should be sufficient. heat treating to relieve stress usually means letting the metal cool down slower than naturally. also, your project probably won't be subjected to the same life expetancy and stresses aerospace applications would so i wouldn't worry about it all that much. john forces chassis were all heat treated and look how much it helped him in that crash a while ago. if you didn't put too much heat into the weld you should be fine.

duffman1278

Not sure how to do that.

The machine is a miller 180. This one to be exact.

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fakts13

did you weld the Al. with the balance set like it is? if so that probably is your reason you're having problems.
the balance is the knob above the power switch. set that between 5-7 for 6061

duffman1278

OoOo I'll try that then when I get to welding again. Thanks!

Hopefully I can get this down so I can fabricate my own intercooler piping and other stuff in the future.

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240sxaddict

Another cage, "discosteak" handled the welding. Sorry about the crappy pics.

fakts13

^^those are some beefy tubes

discosteak

just normal 1 5/8"

fakts13

huh, for some reason they looked larger, maybe it's the black on the interior or somethin? regular dom or chromoly?

xs240

fakts13 your work is frickin amazing, i love it

GSXRJJordan

Didn't want to run the rear down bars back to the strut towers? Most S14 cages connect the strut towers with a cross-bar, and have the rear down bars cross and connect to that... gives you quite a bit less angle - how close to 45* are those down bars?

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fakts13

thanks xs240

TanaMU

What kind of welders do you all have? I'm looking to buy, but I dont know enough about it to know what I should get. I was thinking of spending $500 or so on a MIG that says it can weld up to 1/4" steel? Would that be good enough for welding exhaust piping, roll cage tubing, some brackets, etc?

Otto347

Yes that should be fine, but just buy a name brand (hobart, miller, lincoln) and get one that uses shielding gas. If you are doing small sheet metal work I would suggest using .025 wire. But if your doing .095 to .120 wall stuff then you might want to get .030. Just go to your local welding supply store and talk to someone, they should be able to point you in the right direction.

I have a Millermatic 210 (using an 80lb wire spool and and 230 or 244cf cylinder of 75/25) It last for a long time before I need wire or gas.

Also have a Millermatic 135 with a little bottle of 75/25 and run .025 wire in that one. (use it for sheet metal or small jobs)

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BlazedGlory

I too am thinking about getting a welder. Right now I'm looking at the Miller Diversion 165. I don't know (or maybe care) if it is dumb to jump straight into TIG welding first, but I mainly want to be able to do aluminum, etc.

fakts13

not dumb at all. go for it! diversion is a great bang for the buck welder!