Caoboy

Home Garage Fabricating a Jeep front crossmember.

What we have is 3/16" 2x4 that we used to stretch the frame.

Picked up a 1/2" (12x3x.5) channel for the front crossmember.

I'm taking welding classes, so I have a tiny bit of experience, but not enough to be super competent in preparation.


I'm a bit foggy in how we should go about this. I'm assuming beveling needs to be done on the half inch plate in order to weld it in 'solid'. I am assuming I need a 45* bevel on the plate, and leaving the frame alone. That should give enough weld metal to ensure a good solid joining of the two pieces of metal.


This channel is going to sit inside the frame rails. I'm assuming a fillet weld would be best, since both pieces are perpendicular.

Is this correct or are we going about it wrong?

Caoboy

Is a fillet weld vs a bevel (on the 1/2") weld going to make all the difference in joining these two pieces of metal together ?

Caoboy

Ok so here is what we did.

Started off filling in some gouges from the plasma arc. Once we grinded the surface flush, we fit the cross member between the frame rails again.

We had on hand wire for GMAW (mild steel wire, can't remember the code) and single pass flux core (e71t-gs e2.)

I wanted to run at least 3 passes for a 3/16" fillet weld. We took a test piece of each of the metals we were welding and ran a bead with the GMAW wire. It didn't penetrate enough. We decide to go get some E71t11 035 FCAW that is good for multiple passes and rated for 3/16" metal. Luckily Tractor Supply Co carries a healthy supply of this in stock.

Got back to the house, ran a pass with the e71t11 and it was like butter. The penetration was nice and what we were looking for, much deeper than what the GMAW wire was doing.

Started welding the cross member today, ran out of time, will finish it up tomorrow.

cmwright1986

pictures!

Caoboy

I will try to get some tomorrow. I tend to forget once I get the ball rolling...

that-guy

sounds like you got this pretty well figured out...just remember that when joining the two together to focus the heat into the thicker metal, and pull/push it into the thinner material

and yes, pictures would be great