Lambretta – Welding Project
We live in a terraced house with no storage in front and no garage. So obviously my scooter lives in the dining room.
I had been using a old plank as a ramp to get the scooter up the step into the house. I thought I could do a bit better than that and also get more welding experience at the same time.
Here are a couple of pictures of my efforts,
I was nursing burnt fingers after that. I didn’t notice but during the welding the metal obviously gets extremely hot. I managed to remove the finger print from the tips of almost all my fingers. Gloves and boots would have been a good idea, welding in your Sunday best is not recommended! I had a go at cleaning up the joints with a metal file but it was too much like hard work and very noisy. The steel was easier to file than the weld!
I think you will have much more control with TIG and MIG welding. Arc welding is all about slapping as much on as you can and then shape back later with the grinder. You also get lots of slag which has to be chipped off after each run. Still it’s great fun and you have an enormous sense of having made something substantive. A lot like model making but even better in a way as you can actually do something useful with the end product.
One of those magnetic 90 degree angle jigs would be very useful. It’s all a bit hit and miss without. My mole grips look like they’ve been dropped in a volcano as they’re always right in the way of the bit you want to weld and got a few accidental hits. Something else I learnt was that using wood as a base for welding on is a bad idea as it has a tendency to catch fire!
I made the stencil by printing the logo as a banner over three pages and then cutting it out with a sharp knife. It almost worked but using normal A4 printer paper wasn’t such a good idea as the spray got under some edges. I should have tried to find some cardboard to make a re-usable stencil, the printer paper didn’t hold up well under the spray and I had to bin it.
I wasn’t going for perfection but more of a “thing the factory would have used on the production line” look.