I sometimes think that half of the fun of working on cars is buying the tools. I can spend hours looking through equipment catalogs – paper or online. Several times I have come close to buying a chain saw even though I haven’t got a garden. Now I really needed a welder and I was going to enjoy choosing one.
My first idea was to get a spot welder. I imagined clamping my new body panels in position and just running round the joins putting in a spot weld every couple of centimeters. No smoke, no mask required, no consumables. It would be perfect and I would probably be finished in a couple of weeks.
First stop www.ebay.co.uk. For some reason there were many more second hand spot-welders on eBay’s UK site than their German one (I live in Germany). As luck would have it I just about to drive back to the UK for a short holiday so I bid on a couple of machines and bought this fine specimin for just under 100 pounds.
Whilst I was in England I called in at the Twickenham branch of Machine Mart and got an air operated ‘joggler’ for putting flanges along the edge of the repair panels. As soon as I got the machine back home to my garage, I found that it was fantastic for joining test pieces of steel together. The welds were neat and strong and looked just like the ones made in the factory. Unfortunately joining real parts together was much more of a challenge. Most panels are either to large, too curved or just too inacessible to get into the jaws of the spot welder so I decided that I needed a different type of welding machine.
