A spot of welding

First of all, apologies for the formatting problem on the Archived posts. I need to figure out how to change the margin or wrap the text so that it's all visible, so give me some time.

Back in the garage I spent more time with the abrasive discs removing paint and Bondo. There was much more filler on the left side of the car than I'd hoped and I ended up burning through my remaining discs before the car was done. So I ordered ten more from my local 3M supplier and once I could remove paint no more I set about cleaning the garage up and then moved on to some new things.

A previous owner had put a body protector strip down each side of the car, just below the waistline. All that was left however, was a series of small holes drilled in the metal, from the front fender all the way back to the rear. I debated as to the best method for filling them, and decided to use my Mig welder. It's important not to put too much heat in to the body panel any time you're welding, but also when doing a whole bunch of welding all in a line. I really wasn't sure how it was going to work but I figured that the best way to learn is to do, so I plugged in my welder and set about filling some holes. Fortunately my Miller Mig welder has very fine adjustment and so I set it at the lowest voltage, gave it a little more wire feed speed and started on the first hole. The trick is to go in very short bursts and to limit them to as few is required to fill the hole. I'd heard that using compressed air to cool the weld down helps so I tried this, but I can't tell if it worked or not. I didn't seem to be getting any warpage from heat so things seemed ok. Once the hole is welded closed you have to remove the excess material with a grinder. I used my pneumatic angle grinder for this with a small abrasive grinding disc. The only problem I had is that it's hard to remove just the weld without also removing metal around it. The resulting low spot will need to be filled with filler in order to get the panel completely straight. The end result is that while I feel better about having the hole filled with melted metal rather than body filler, I still end up having to use a small amount of it anyway. The jury is still out on whether or not I want to do the rest of the holes this way. Here's what I ended up with.