MOT-welding

[Tibby]

Hi
I have just done this welding for a friend and wondered whether it will be OK for an MOT. It is on a spitfire chassis,and has been done in 2mm plate.I have usually practised on 1mm plate.Do I still need to follow the same rules with 2mm ie tack and then do about an inch at a time to avoid distortion or could I simply have welded it without stopping,always assuming I could see what I was doing amid the smoke!!



Thanks

Tibby

PS I hope I am posting in the right section if not I apologise in advance !

 

[runnach]

I'm no expert on MOT standards, but welds look fine. As for stop starting, I suppose this will depend on various factors, thus said, area viewed looks pretty sturdy for complete runs. I'm sure others will follow with replies who have car welding eperience!

Cheers...

 

[mart]

I`m no expert either, but it looks better than the MOT welding on my car that was done at the garage. (I cannot really see what is happening in the R hand corner of the second pic). The metal around the area looks nice & clean.

 

[pedrobedro]

If you're not burning through keep going. 2mm is hefty stuff for chassis repairs and shoud last and the welding looks fine.

 

[scott0031]

Agree its more then fine for MOT standard. Nearly all have seen done by garages is abysmal and that's paying it a compliment and it sails through a MOT when its cleary some of the worst welding that's possible to achieve and sort of still being able to call it welding.

Kind regards,


Scott

 

[KTMMICK]

That is perfectly acceptable for MOT standards......personally I would have liked to see a little more weld and penetration, but assume you are using a smallish machine.

 

[steveo3002]

looks 10x better than most of the mot welds ive seen

tickle it up with a grinder and its all good

 

[Wedg1e]

Looks good to me! I went to look at a crashed TVR a couple of months back... the chassis is fabbed from 1.5" diameter tubes with 2mm wall, plus odd bits of plate. What usually happens on these cars is that the outriggers that hide under the sills rot due to the crud chucked up from the tyres.
The sensible way to repair is to lift the bodyshell off the chassis, but in this case they'd just raised the shell about 8" so they could get at the top of the tubes. Then they'd put an angle grinder through the tubes that run out from the spine of the chassis. OK so far... but the new tube sections were merely butted to the old ones, not sleeved, so they all pointed off in different directions; welded by a passing pigeon (SERIOUSLY blobby!) and the shell dropped back on...

 

[pedrobedro]

but the new tube sections were merely butted to the old ones, not sleeved, so they all pointed off in different directions; welded by a passing pigeon (SERIOUSLY blobby!)

A friend of ours had a TVR Cerbera and the chassis was like that from new, I had built a Locost and SVA would not have entertained the welds if they had looked like his.

 

[m1ecy]

Yep, I would pass that when I were a tester

 

[Wedg1e]

A friend of ours had a TVR Cerbera and the chassis was like that from new, I had built a Locost and SVA would not have entertained the welds if they had looked like his.

Trouble with TVR was that they were never too picky about the skill level of their staff; they never had job titles so could be easily shifted from task to task - if you don't like it, you know where the door is, that kind of thing.

Consequently you get a lot of variation in the standard of welding... one guy in Canada bought an '80s wedge and has spent more time moaning about the welding than driving it.

Some years back I went on a factory tour at Blackpool; I work in the non-destructive testing industry so naturally I was curious to know, if the welders weren't 'coded', how did they monitor the standard of construction. So I asked the tour guide if they performed any NDT on the chassis and he shifted from foot to foot, glanced around and mumbled something about 'they do ultrasonics'.
Horse-dung. Ultrasonics on new welds, on inch-and-a-half tube, with all those angled joints and curves? It'd take you all day to identify the real back-wall echo...

Lotus started galvanising their chassis around the turn of the 80's. It'd have been nice if TVR had done the same. As it is, there are 10 year old Chimaeras, Griffiths and Cerberas with chassis as bad as quarter-century old wedges. I remember seeing a 4-year-old Cerbera in Harrogate that was already missing most of its chassis paint; that must have been a decade ago because the guy working on it left HHC and has been a Cerbera specialist ever since.