Loading…
16
PSA: a welder in Cleveland talked me out of grinding my frame welds smooth and he was right
I built a steel bike frame in my garage last month and spent two hours grinding the welds on the top tube until they looked like glass. My neighbor Ray, who welded pipe for 30 years down at the plant in Cleveland, walked over, looked at it, and said "you just took out half the strength for a look nobody's gonna see." At first I figured he was just being old school, but then he showed me a cutaway of a ground-down weld and the throat was way thinner than the toe. I ended up leaving the rest of the joints raw and honestly the stack of dimes looks better than any smooth filler I've done. Is there any case where grinding is actually the right call, or did I just waste an afternoon?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
riley5171d ago
Ray sounds like the kind of guy worth listening to. Reminds me of my uncle who did body work on old cars, he always said the same thing about filler and paint, that you can hide a lot but you can't hide what you took off. I spent a whole weekend sanding down a set of cast aluminum valve covers once til they shined, and a machinist buddy pointed out I'd thinned the flanges so bad they wouldn't seal right anymore. Had to buy a new set. So yeah, grinding is right when it's a fillet that's gonna take a bolt or a gasket face that needs true, but for looks on a raw frame? Leave it be. The stack of dimes is the point, it shows you did the work.
1