History Welding History When did they start differnt types???

In auto industry or backyard when did it become popular or common for mig, gas, wire, tig and any others

 

I've wondered the same thing as the rear quarters on my '30 buick are welded to the back panel. Nice looking bead that's pretty narrow. Early wire feed? Or a very patient O/A?

 

Most likely gas welding. Probably one guy on the torch/filler rod and maybe one or two on hammers and dollies following close behind to keep everything flat. I've seen some sedan bodies with welds right up the middle of the rear panel and you almost couldn't see the weld...on either side.

-Bigchief.

 

I've got a friend who has been in this hobby since the '50s/'60s. He said in the '60s and early '70s, you were the neighborhood hero if you had a stick welder.
Brazing and O/A welding were a lot more common and could be done in sheds, garages and driveways that didn't have access to electricity. Well, beefy electricity to run a welder. EVERYONE has a cutting torch. The skilled guys in the group could weld with them.

-Brad

 

Arc welding was used extensively in Ship building during WW II...

 

In my neighborhood in the fifties, the local guys were almost exclusively using O/A and used coat hangers for filler rod.
When we started the little deuce coupe we had to tow the car over to another gas station about 5 miles away because they had an arc welder to weld in the motor mounts. The guy welded in the factory all day and welded in the gas station all night. Few stations had arc welders, and the good welders were few and far between, except for the factories.

 

My grandfather and his brother had a welding shop in 1921. It was cutting edge, like computers were in the 80s. They stick welded with bare wire, and a CO2 purge. fluxed rod came later. Some of the OE manufacturers were wire welding on bodies in 1931, also elecric resistance spot welding started about the same time. 34 Airflows were the first cars with a welded frame, it was wire feed.

 

We were still using torches to weld/braze with in the body shop trade til into the 70's. I remember the first time i used a mig welder, 77 or 78. Thought I was in heaven.

There's a guy in Reno/Sparks. that does very high dollor stuff. Everything he does is metal finished. I saw a '36 3-window with a chopped top he repaired; he pieced in the passenger side rear post area that extended from the door opening almost around to the rear window opening, cut in above the belt line and above the crown of the roof. Not only did he metal finish it on the outside, but on the inside as well. All done with a torch. And when I refer to "metal finished" I'm not talkin' about ready for a skim coat of mud.......I'm refering to "ready for primer and paint". Everything that leaves his shop does so in bare metal...That way there are no secrets....

So... Torches are still vialble in this day of mig/tig everything..

 

I first heard about MIG welding in 1983....about 5 years after I got my AC buzz box. A torch set was out of my financial reach.

I have a neat book about arc welding written in 1939, when it was first being introduced to many industries.

 

i seem to remember seeing a picure of a 50' ford being built and they were using arc rods on the body panels.

 

The first mig welder I saw/used was 1973 when I first started working in a welding shop, but I'm sure they were around long before that. Auto manf. used spot/stick welding in at least 1936 and long before that I'm sure. http://www.auto-history.tv/filmarchive/manufac/SO32SBSE/

 

I've got a 1928 Graham Paige sedan. The rear tub is electrically welded together. Not sure on the process, but I have been told that around this time they used bare wire DC welding, with a heavy electrode and the polarity reversed to how we would normally weld today ( positive to ground? ) to put the bulk of the heat into the electrode rather than the workpiece.

 

I did all the welding on my first car, a '51 Chevy 2dr, with O/A and coat hangers. This was in '62/'63. Torch was borrowed. Bought my first welder in '66 when I got into stock cars. A 180 amp. Miller AC. Boy, that was a nice little welder. I remember in about '63 0r '64, seeing a guy do a demo of a Forney. Man that guy could make that welder talk. Doesn't much matter what a fella uses as much as how good you are w/it........

 

I just removed the rear panels on my 29 Pk Up cab for replacement, and they were spot welded to the hidem strip that runs vertically on both sides. All original stuff, suprised me, I didn't think they did spot welding then.

 

There's not an electric weld on my 1930 chrysler body for what that's worth.

It appears the MIG/TIG debate is an old one, only difference is the acronyms change every few decades to reflect the latest technology.

Makes ya wonder what the next step will be huh? Optical recognition welder that self compensates and makes perfect beads?????? Cordless welders for the masses??????? Sharks with frickin laser beams????????

 

I took a welding apprenticship in the early 80's . Since i had the same instructer for all classes i told him i would pass on the mig and tig section and just stay with the arc . Man now i wish i would have taken them

 

In the early 60s you were the king of the hill if you had a hip roof buzz box Lincoln and a set of torches in your garage. Most of the wire feed welders were made for heavy industrial welding of big vessels and such. My first used one (it was probably stolen) ran .045 wire. It was fine for frames but no good for body panels.

When the body shop migs first started to show up they were out of the hobbyist's price range. A buzz box was a little over a hundred and a body shop mig was 1500.

I gas welded everything using jack stands and a creeper My first 8 years in the exhaust business during the 80s.

In the 60s I used to haul the tanks home in my 58 Plymouth over the weekend from the construction site that I was working on to cut and weld on the hot rods. Mine and my buddies.

 

Lots of 30s cars have NICE electro-welds holding the top pieces together. IE: Packard,Graham etcc

 

Back in the '50'S I bought a "carbon arc" torch from an ad in Popular Mechanics.......I think I paid $12.99 for it...........I learned a lot from that little welder!

 

There was Forged type welding on the great wall of China. They still can't weld any good.

 

Just cut away the gas tank from a 29 cowl,looks like a resistance weld,done from both sides with a wheeled type device...looks just like the weld on my V/8 sixty motor.Does not look like a puddle type bead,unless they rolled it later,after the weld.Anyone know for sure? Looks identical to modern resistance welded sheet metal fittings...Couldn't find anything definitive on the web.

 

In the shop I grew up in, my Dad had a Craftsman buzz box and a Craftsman torch set purchased about 1972. We didn't get the Marquette brand MIG til about 1980, and it was a whole new world then. I learned to oxy/acet weld at about 11 years old, but never did use that old arc welder. The MIG could do everything we needed after it came into the picture. It was about the same for all the other car builders in our small Iowa town.

First tried my hand at TIG welding a couple years ago, and I will say I'm not too bad if I can just keep the tungsten out of the puddle. It's fun, just like the old torch set was when I was a kid.

 

thought maybe someone would like these pieces of history. to go with the words.

 

I worked in a welding shop in the early 60's thay had a wire room with some old wire that was cloth wraped. The germans were arc welding in the 30's.

 

Same story on my '31 for the hidem strip to the bed. I think there were 3 or 4 spots per side. However, they used several rivets to hold it on also. Apparently they didn't quite trust the early spots to hold up?? Belt and suspenders.

 

I am a welder by trade,...and have been into the historical side of my profession for a while now. I was fortunate to have picked up some old Oxy Acetalyne Tips, Welder's Digest, and some other magazines and periodicals. If anyone might be interested, I'd be more than happy to share some info from them??

I can scan some stuff,....will post some later if I get the chance.

Quick timeline run down...

The simplest process of welding dates back from before 2000 AD when steel plates were pressure lap-welded.

The process of the Carbon-arc dates back to the 1800s when it was discovered. Hence the term "arc-lighting" a simplified version of the basic thing that takes place in the welding process.

- Oxy-Acetalyne Welding (aka "gas welding")
The popular and widely seen welding proccess seen in the early 1900s and into the 1920s and so on,...still done today and with great results! It was and still is a vrey accessable way to weld, though a lot of the finesse that was galvanized by the talented people who wilded torch and rod are long gone,....so in some ways it is a bit of a lost art.

SMAW (Shielded Metal Acr Welding) aka, "stick welding" came about in the late 1920s and was seen more so in the usa around the 30s where it saw wide spread use in factories, etc. The need for better welding came after WWI.


Gas Tungston Welding - (TIG)
Came about by the 1940s, though there's some debate that it was done in the 40s,...I've talked with guys who were welders in the 40s and 50s,...all kinds of welding backgrounds too,....its up in the air with most guys, but the books all read that it was discovered by an idea that was brought about by a man named C.L. Coffin. Hobart really refined the idea in the 1920s,....as in "Hobart" welders!


actually here's a good site I had seen a while ago inmy travells...

http://www.weldinghistory.org

 

people here dont like it when you gas weld.....=( i think i almost got my head ripped off a few times.

 

I keep hearing about Coat Hangers for O/A Welding.

Why did people do that ?

If you can buy a Coat Hanger, you can buy Welding Rod, right?

Or were they that much cheaper?

What about the Metal they were made off?

Were the Welds that were done with Coat Hangers as strong?

 

The uniform company that supplied my work clothes supplied them free of charge every week. I'm welding exhaust pipes not nuclear power plants. They are mild steel probably the same quality as the tubing that tail pipes and quarter panels are made of. I used to joke about one laundry's coat hangers as being stronger than the other laundry but in reality it's all mild steel and they all welded very well. I've known guys that get all huffy about using "shit steel" coat hangers but I just laugh. The welds are just as strong as the exhaust pipes that they were used to join together. I'm sure all the theorists will come unglued over my opinion. It is, after all, just my opinion based on years of success. Others will disagree.