Well, some of the first rust-hole patching that I'm going to have to do on the beast will be small patches that are vertical. I was practicing today (off the car), and my horizontal welds are coming out pretty good, but I'm having problems with the vertical welds. I'm using a small Lincoln MIG with gas BTW. For thin sheet metal like our cars, is it better to run the bead top to bottom, or bottom to top? I was having the most problems trying a vertical weld with the pieces at 90 degrees to each other (an inside corner). It was like the gas was cooling the metal too fast or blowing the weld pool off, and it kept dripping and not penetrating. Do I need less gas pressure for vertical welding? Any advice would be appreciated. I'm going to keep practicing before working on the car... .

Thanks.

I've always had the best luck with running a bead from the bottom up with both Mig and arc as well. It allows the metal to "pool" a little better and give a bit smoother resulting bead.

I've always used the same gas pressure for all my welding... so as far as lowering the pressure when welding vertically, I dunno... if the bead is dripping off, it sounds like you might be too slow running your bead, or perhaps a little too fast with the wire speed...

Best thing to do is practice, practice, practice.... Try it with a little slower wire speed and see how that turns out. Try it one way and then the other, (bottom to top and visa versa) and see which way you get the best bead... some people can do it one way and not the other, some can do it either way....

For vertical welds on thin sheet, try doing the weld as a series of overlapping dots by:

1. Aim at start of weld

2. pull trigger for about 1 second

3. aim for the edge of the 1/4" dot you just created

4. wait for one second

5. repeat from step two until complete

You will find that you can use more voltage without blowing through using this technique.

Good suggestions so far. I'll try anything on my practice stuff. Any other ideas are welcome too.

Thanks for the advice!

i sent my welder(anniversarry gift ) back and got a better one, i cant wait to try to butn down my garage again!

Robs advice is right on the money, just remember

to not try to go to fast, it is easy to burn through

or cause some major warping, good luck