Welding Tips and Tricks

So I returned to working on the wife-eee's dream car build. I'm at the point in the process of body work/paint. I have elected to do that myself and will do so within my workshop. There is limited space therein, and so I need to have the ability to move the car around every which way necessary. That means car dollies. Easy enough, I happen to have four "heavty duty" variants. Put one of them under each corner and proceeded with the prep and painting of the inside of the doors and the door jambs. Began on the driver's side. Finished that. Went to move the car to the left in order to gain access to the pax side to do those doors/door jambs when those so-called "heavies" took a dump: Uuuuggghhhh. Yeah, not so "heavy duty" after all. We came by these critters via CL and the fella was wanting to be rid of them. They've done ok-ish thus far but not used all that often. Thus the reason for "cheaping out" with a pair from CL, I might add. I digress.

Given my chosen approach to laying down some color on the wife-eee's daily, I need a full complement of these critters. And so I paused the build in order to do a little fab work to bring them back online. Thought I'd share the story with the forum...

Admittedly I haven't ever taken a close look at these puppies, crazily enough. I did so today. As one might guess, they are made abroad: And given the HF tags that I found on the casters, it's little wonder as to where they originated. Having decided to just repair these instead of going-new, I removed the dollies from underneath the front of the vehicle and laid them on the workbench. Make note that I am in no fashion attempting a glorified restoration of these dollies. Hardly. They'll get a light touch of The Brilliance, but that will be the limit. So keep that in mind as we go along. And speaking of the limitations that I am imposing on this little side project, the rear two dollies are doing ok, so I'm not certain that I'll repair those at this time. Perhaps down the road. If they'll continue to function given the lower weight that they are being subjected to, then I'll leave them be for now. Note that both of the casters on the driver's side collapsed outboard, thus deforming the metal in that area of the dolly: How effed up is effed up? That's effed up. After removing the casters and tossing them into the lil' un's metal recycling bin, the first item on the agenda was the straightening of the body: A quick round on the hydraulic press and some hammering put things right, at least as much as I cared to get it "straight" anyway. Repeated for the other end: As fortune would so have it, the dolly on the pax side of Ol' Blue was damaged also, though not as severely as the one on the driver's side: So off came its casters, dumped those into the metal recycling bin, and made a visit to the press, finishing things off with the hammer. Lather, rinse, repeat and that dolly was on the mend too. At that point I had two dollies that I could work with: I busted out the grinder with the flap disc and went to work on the 4 corners, both top and bottom: Generally, due to the deformation, the plan is to strengthen these critters a tad. There are a number of ways that you could set about so-doing. I've chosen to use some plate that I have on hand (in sheet form), cut strips of it that will stiffen the corners by tying them together and then weld them in position. The plate is thin as "plate" goes in the metal fabrication world, but significantly thicker than say automotive body sheet metal. 14 ga IIRC. This should suffice for my goals for this strengthening project. I left things there so that I could take the family out to lunch. Treat "mama" (which in this context means my wife) and son to lunch dontchaknow. Then we stopped by Tractor Supply to see what type of casters they had on-hand. For various reasons I settled on these 600lb rated variants: Fitting, given the origin of the dollies themselves.

Unfortunately that is as much progress as this day would see. Family stuff superseded. More later.

Hope all is well!

Alright fellas... I managed to polish off this little side project. Well almost. The casters for the second dolly won't arrive until tomorrow, but that is just a repeat of drilling and installing so... for all intent and purposes this one has come to a close.

In the end I couldn't bring myself to slice-n-dice up a good sheet of plate. So I called on some slightly thinner scrap that I had lying around to serve as a stiffening of sorts. Even though this addition is not of huge benefit, it still seemed worthy of doing. And so I cut the four strips: I intentionally cut them a tad long so that I could form them around the sides: And then tacked along that edge. Flipped it over and closed the old caster bolt holes with weld. Flipped it back over, stitched the bottom sides, ground off as much of the kruft as I could be bothered to do, then applied etch: I realize that I stated that I had no intention of doing a restoration, but I had a couple of cans of Rustoleum Autumn Brown (textured) sitting in the cabinet and no project on the radar in which I would use them, so I decided to go just a bit further than originally planned. Both received a couple of light coats: Then came the "fun stuff": drilling. Uuuuggghhhh. I chose to simply drill by hand, as it was the easiest and least time consuming. I'd go through a few bits regardless, and of course I did. Anyway a tad later we had this: The purdiest set of HF dollies you could imagine. The second dolly still needs the casters installed, but as I mentioned above they won't arrive until tomorrow (or so). More of the same though, so I'll call an end to the report at this point in the process.

Hope all is well! Take care!
Jerry

Not that it does you any good at this point but a "good to know" thing is that casters with flat wheels (though last longer) are harder to maneuver than wheels that have a radius (more surface area touching the floor equals more friction). Also, a good note is that if the arm that connects to the wheel has a bend in it, that is an engineer's way to strengthen material that is too thin to hold the weight needed otherwise (thinner material equals cheaper to make). Like the ones you bought are bang on. Since the dolley itself bent also, I would get some 1/4" cold roll flat bar and drill holes for the casters with 2 stich welds in the middle for extra support, but I like to over build things for myself. That way if you don't see a bolt on the floor or something and run into it the inertia of the 2,000 lbs. car coming to a sudden stop doesn't bend your newly refurbed dollies again. Which now that you have some good casters, is the weak point.

https://www.amazon.com/Moogiitools-1000 ... 12&sr=1-25