Well, considering travel costs from the centre of Saskatchewan, lodging, and labour, probably more than it would cost you to get a local shop to do it. Although at what I hear local shops are charging these days, maybe not. You could learn how to weld, it didn't take me that long to learn how to make an acceptable weld (if a little crude). The worst part is that if you're not good at it you tend to end up with a pretty thick weld that takes a lot of grinding but even that works out fine in the end. Also, burn through is pretty common at first and you have to zap at the hole, wait a couple seconds, zap it again, etc. until you fill it in. To avoid warpage tack weld your piece in every couple of inches then weld between one set of tacks move several inches over weld between two other sets of tacks, and move around so you don't do too much in one area and build heat to warp the metal. I figure it only took me 2 or 3 hours of practice before I could do an acceptable weld on most surfaces. Overhead welding is another story though as the molten metal drips as you're going and it can take A LOT of grinding, the best way to do it is with short bursts of the welder so big drips don't get a chance to form. I still have trouble with overhead welding, about half the time I get my sweety to do it for me as he's better at it than I am. Its important to have a good mig welder as well, the first mig I bought was $300 (the cheapest I could find) and I was never able to produce a continuous weld with it, it kept cutting in and out. For the longest time I thought it was just me being unskilled, but eventually I decided I couldn't be that bad, it must be a faulty welder and one day my boyfriend bought me a new Lincoln mig pak 15 and sure enough as soon as I tried that one I could see my problems were soon to be over.
Topic: Priya's SX/4 project (Read 373571 times)