Less work than I would have liked to get done but progress nonetheless.

I got some stainless tubing just to see if it was easy to brun through and play around with the settings a little.

As you can see it has a raised edge to it. I didn't think it was a strong weld so I cut it and then fully welded the tube and tried to break it. No such luck with the hammer so I accepted the fact that it won't look quite like a tig weld lol. The settings on my hobart were on 4 and then wire speed was about 35 to 40. Any slower and you don't maintain the pool and any faster it piles up higher which is wasted wire. I could step up to 5 on the power but since the weld was plenty strong and fat at 4 I stayed there.

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I was going to set it up and tack on the vehicle but with the extra tubing gone from the cutting it didn't center nicely that way so I used my marks and tacked it on the table.

Set up took a little while to be satisfactory.





Tacked and ready for test fitting. I made small tacks so if I had to break it all up and start over I could.



Pretty good fit. I wanted to take a picture of it but there was a little pressure from moving the ypipe to line up but nothing unreasonable. So time to weld this sucker. I went with a stitching pattern to make sure I sealed it up completely and welded in opposite sections to allow everything to cool. Stainless loves to seal the heat in and it doesn't spread out like with carbon steel.



Apparently the thing you want to watch for is sugaring of the weld which signifies that the chromium has been compromised. I didn't get any but I will still be using some hi temp paint tomorrow before I throw it in and loosely install the driver side.

Once I get that in I will turn my attentions to the passenger side and wrap this up. Ran out of time today because I was waiting on the post office to deliver everything from Amazon.