"Bertie the Bunyip" wrote in message
.. .
wrote in news:a4e90596-4834-48d2-9236-
:


I've done a little welding but nothing my LIFE depended on!


You learn,. And you learn how to read the weld so if it looks good, it is
good.

Very bad information. How a weld "looks" has very if anything to do with
it's effectiveness.


I had the same concern when I started learning to do aircraft welding. I
talked to the guy who dsigned my airplane, Dudley Kelly. He told me to get
some lessons and then weld it up and not worry. In his words "If you get
25% of each joint right it will still exceed design specs"

This is going to be entirely load or design dependant. Yes, two sleeved
tubes, laterally loaded can easily survive with just a couple of tack welds,
but if the joint is in tension 25% is seldom even close.

You should see the welds on old pipers! They're crap!
And Bellanca were using MIG to weld their fuselages for a long time and to
my knowledge, none of them has come apart because of that..
After I learned to do only a passable job ( i'm better at it now) I found
that I could take a piece I'd made, put it in a vice and beat the hell out
of it and the weld and the area around it would be the last thing to fail.
Ask in RAH, though. Plenty of guys building/have built the kinds of
airplanes you might be interested in.


Yes, a lot of good welds look terrible, and yes it is very dependant on the
design and load of the joint. But either statement taken in general context
is very incorrect.