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Archive, Eastwood Chatter

How To Bend Metal With A TIG Welder

Bending metal can be pretty simple with basic hand tools if you’re doing thin materials, but once you get past sheet metal and into thicker materials over 1/8″ it can be difficult to make sharp bends in metal without extreme force. In the past heating metal with an Oxy-Acetylene torch was one of the few ways you could bend thicker materials with ordinary shop tools. This method was common when every garage had a set of torches on hand. In today’s world a gas torch is less common as most use a plasma cutter or electric welder to cut and weld metal. In this tutorial we show how you can turn your TIG welder into a heating device and bend thick gauge metals with your TIG welder at home.

Archive, Eastwood Chatter

5 TIG Welder Upgrades You Can Afford

The nice thing about the influx of guys and gals with TIG welders at home is that we are able to fill out or line of TIG accessories. This allows you to customize your welder to fit your needs (and budget). Once you get the process down you can quickly learn what add-ons will help you make a nicer weld. We’ve quizzed Eastwood employees and customers to find what the top TIG welder accessories are. Read below to learn more about each of them.

Archive, Eastwood Chatter

When do you save a panel or throw it away? Repairing a Rusty Trunk Lid

When your fabrication and welding skills start to progress you’ll get to a point where not much scares you as far as repair goes. Whether it’s rust or just old body damage anything can be fixed with enough time and skills. Over the past few years I’ve started to get myself to that point where I often have to approach a rusty panel with the question “Is it worth my time to fix it?”. The answer can differ for many reasons. Is the panel easily available aftermarket or good used? How expensive are the panels? How soon do I need it versus how long it takes to get a replacement part?

Archive, Eastwood Chatter

Making a Custom Spoon Gas Pedal for a Channeled Hot Rod

I’ve heavily modified a set of Ford F1 pedals to work in my channeled car that involved shortening, heating and bending, and reshaping the curves to fit into the car. Now I needed to fit the “GO” pedal in between the transmission tunnel, the pedals, and the steering column tube. I’ve seen some guys put a step in their tunnel and rest their heel on the tunnel but it just doesn’t “flow” like I’d like. Don’t get me wrong that method is very function-able, but I wanted a pedal that was correct looking and flowed into the provided space without having to cut up my nice tunnel I made a few months ago.

Archive, Eastwood Chatter, Metalwork & Fabrication, Tech Articles, Welding & Welders

Get Comfortable and Step Up Your TIG Game

Step up your TIG game and take your machine to the next level, enabling you to perform stronger and better looking welds. Regardless of the capabilities of the machine that you have, if you are looking to lay down the same great looking welds over and over, you have to be comfortable in your welding position. It’s good practice to take your time to get into a comfortable position and take a dry run before you start an arc. This will tell you whether your position will enable you to complete your weld from end to end without stopping and starting.

Archive, DIY & How To, Eastwood Chatter, Metalwork & Fabrication, Tech Articles, Welding Projects

How to Tighten up a Weld Seam on a Patch Panel.

No one’s perfect, but we can do our best to strive to get the closest we can get to perfection every day. These ideals are the same whether you’re a cook, a machinist, a landscaper, or a guy in his garage building an old car or motorcycle. One big lesson I’ve learned over the past few years has been to slow down and take the time to make sure that parts fit together as nice as possible before welding. Just blindly rough cutting a piece and trying to make it fit another piece is going to end with an uneven weld seam and won’t end well!

Archive, DIY & How To, Eastwood Chatter, Metalwork & Fabrication, Tech Articles, Welding Projects

How to Channel A Ford Model A

Back in the late 1940’s-1960’s it was pretty easy to distinguish if a hot rod in a magazine was built on the east coast or on the west. One of the big differences is how the profile and stance of the car differed. An “east coast hot rod” was easily identifiable by its low ride height and body channeled pretty hard over the chassis without chopping or lowering the roof. It seems as the years went on guys were channeling and lowering their cars more and more until there was almost no ground clearance and no headroom from the raised floor.