How to Use an English Wheel on a Weld

Got a couple hours to kill this morning so, you guessed it, we're back on the seat top. What we're going to do is pretty much the usual. Hop on some scrubbing, cutting, trimming, welding, varnishing and then by the end of it we should have the whole center section complete. How do we start this process? Pretty simple. Get our panels, click good in place. From there what we're going to do is just mark all the excess between the two panels and then go and trim it off so we have about 2-3mm left. Once that's done, scrub our final line, get to cutting with the shears. And now just a little bit of tape so we can see exactly and easily where we want to cut. Once that's laid down, you know what time it is, cutting time! Once that's cut we just hit it with a file and a quick deburr. Now we can handle the panel nicely. It's always the worst if you don't deburr it and then you pick up a panel, it slides out of your hands and wham, cut your finger, ruin your day. So it's just five seconds of prep for a lot less risk. Now that that's trimmed, all we do is click our panels back in place and we are left with 2-3mm overlap. So we're ready to scrub it and go on our final cut. What we want to do is we just want to take our time on this prep work and emphasize taking your time. Because if our panels line up 100% then the weld and the planish is going to be seamless, quick, easy. If we don't take our time and we end up cutting it wrong and it's all wavy and we've got gaps to fill, then we know hey we're in for a nightmare and this is going to take way longer than it needs to. So our panels can't move, they keep going in place and we'll just scrub, pushing our scrub in exactly that corner. What I like to do is go over three or four times, really gouge a scrub line into there. I'm not doing this because my scrub is blunt, I'm doing this because I want one definite line that I can follow with confidence and just cut it on that exact line and I know hey if I don't deviate from that then my panel should line up 100%. What we can do now is just pull our panel off, free floating, stick it back on. That way we can ensure it's just another way to check that we're in the correct equal holes and nothing moved because we can see our scrub line still lines up 100%. So that's ready to cut, let's get it cutting. And now that that's all trimmed up we can see hey hey that's all fitting and flowing. Now that that's all prepped and ready to weld I guess the last thing left to do is weld it. Well hot damn, those three tacks pulled so much that there's such a look here now if I tack it anymore it's going to go all funny. So what I'm going to have to do is just planish those out a little bit so that this comes down and then carry on tacking. What I'm going to do first though actually is actually just try one more tack there so it doesn't break off and then do those steps. So to stretch those tacks out we're going to do it in the fastest possible way I know and that's just grabbing this huge panel and winging it through the wheel under very very low pressure. This should evenly stretch out the tacks and not stretch the base material itself. This is a little bit of a bugger on such a big panel because if I let the panel loose and loosen it a little bit it's going to run at an angle and the top angle is just going to run lines into the panel and to clean those out is a mission to say the least. We're winning we're winning slowly and after wheeling it we can see again hey hey our panels are nicely fitting and flowing. Still a little bit loose but as soon as I tack it they're going to seat in their place a hundred percent. And time to blast what hopefully will be the final tacks before the weld. And looky looky that is all the tacks ground down, flanished, panels fitting and flowing. So last thing left to do take us to the welding table and weld it up. Not the prettiest weld but when welding sheet metal you're not always aiming for the prettiest weld. You just want to ensure a hundred percent penetration so that you don't have to weld both sides and you can just get to grinding and flanishing. Now just like that it's all ground down and sitting all wonky. So if we have a look hey it's miles away and miles away but all ground down. So what we can do is we're just going to run it through the wheel. I'm starting on almost no pressure and then upping the pressure one pass, two pass, three pass, four pass until it's all pretty evenly stretched and then we're going to hit it with a file again and address it from there. See how we're going to work this situation. So this panel is nice big and awkward now so what we're going to do is just very little pressure and run it through just to get it all in the same plane. Up the pressure and go on with that. But while we're doing this we're trying to hold it in the exact same shape it wants to be. So now that we've wheeled it there we go we can see the edges are sitting pretty damn nice all along the way and this side too is sitting almost exact all the way. Still a little bit hard one or two mils up there and this side also one or two mils up there. But what we're going to do now is just file what's left of this weld down and then we can carry on addressing the rest of it. So now before we even carry on what I'm going to do is just circle where I can feel major lows and I'm going to bring them up a little bit on the wheel. Then from there we go to hammer and dolly and we tap down a little bit of highs we have and just do all the finicky work to finish this off and get it flowing properly. So there I've got two major lows just stick those on the wheel bring them up quick fix and then the time consuming work. Let's get it done quickly. A smidge more in the center and it's done. And that's where we're leaving us off for today. So we've got the weld majority planished but still needs three four hours work if not more. We can see there's a low running along this whole side a low in the middle there but for the most part it is fitting and flowing if I like to play games with me. You can see they're fitting and flowing for the most part now it's just addressing the highs knocking them down bringing the lows up and then the center section is nearly complete.