I am a cowboy welder...
...and I'll tip my Stetson, well, sombrero (does that make me a goucho welder? or if I had a moustache a Groucho welder?) to the other amateurs who've ignored professional welder's advice to pay them a sack of cash to do the job instead.
I know that all the 'looks good' comments about the welds I achieved with my £60 from Amazon MMA stick welder (there it is on the floor while I made my fuel tank mounts!!!) -
...were mostly people just being polite, and I know I should have bought a more expensive rig and taken a proper college course first, but I do take issue with the assertion that the job I did isn't safe.
My first point is that my donor was sold to me as being 'practically MOT ready and it did look good -
The ad indicated that it had benefited from 'extensive professional chassis restoration', and on removing the body I found that there were beautiful, smoothly looped welds on most of the outriggers, both side rails and in places on the main rails. Nice.
Then I gave them a poke with a screwdriver to 'prove' them for myself, which is when I found that the beautiful welds had been used to disguise this -
...paper thin sheet steel expertly welded over the ferrous oxide and fresh air that was holding the chassis together. In fact, all that had been holding the chassis together was the fact that it was bolted to the body.
So I taught myself to weld and made sure that I only welded sound metal to sound metal, using new parts where available -
I also made sure anything structural was strong enough for me to stand on without failure, and I'm no ballerina. Overall I'm 100% satisfied that my ugly, spattered welds are strong enough to do whatever job they needed to do on my chassis and frame.
Do I have any actual evidence for this claim? Well, yes actually. The welds that are subject to the most strain, which are under tension even when the car is parked up and not being used, are the mounts I fabricated to raise the parking brake cable guides (to compensate for the altered rear wheel camber) -
They've now been under a lot of stress for two years and have been tested to the extreme - they've twice had an MOT tester pull the handbrake on so hard it locked the rear tyres up at 30mph, and I jacked the back of the car up without releasing the handbrake first (bad idea) which resulted in the (brand new) handbrake cable snapping, but my welding held fast.
And as for the risk of driving one of these, there's a level of risk in everything. Over the next few months I'll be driving my home built Spyder on backroads and motorways and sure, it's not going to be as safe in a crash as a modern car, but in August I'll also be climbing aboard one of these with my family -
Can you guess which mode of transport I'm more worried about?