I welded up a few sections of my exhaust today and then cleaned the welds with a hand grinder....what do you guys think??

Flex Pipe:








Magnaflow muffler:








I'm going to paint all of this with a heat resistant paint so that it doesn't all rust up on me.....

 

don't take so much out when you grind it. You really do take alot of the integrity out of the weld. Just leave a small amount of the weld on there, you can still grind them down but not that far.

 

how the hell are we supposed to rate the welds if you grinded them off? :P

 

Looks good to me.

 

WHen you grind a weld down, think of it like taking a Bobcat and leveling your yard. Do you go immediately to the low areas and start digging? Hell no... you take the high spots down. You need to do the same when you're grinding. Stay on the weld itself for as long as you can, until it's gone, then lightly blend the area adjacent to it.

 

Thats good info to know cause i was doing the same as him... I think the welds look good...

 

It's very common for people to do that. I came up with this analogy when I was teaching a welding class for a company. It seemed to really get the point across to the guys that wanted to put deep gouges in their test plates.

 

you have to be careful because with most low power, low price migs, ---- some of the weld strength and integrity is what is above the weld and aparent on top of the base metal


you should really give us a shot of the penetration, if you have full pen, which is hard to do sometimes with lower priced, 110v migs then you need to ------ that weld out and grab as much metal and involve more surface area for strength





so far so good tho



i use to do this when making dumptubes for people and kept wonderin why they were having crakin issues, back in the day. nowi know, it was part my machine and part me for grinding sooo much to make it pretty. which kinda defeated the purpose

 

Yea, you definitely ground too much down. I made teh same mistake on my dumptube abd it has cracked like 4 times since I made it. Had to repair it and left the welds alone. Your welds will crack. maybe not imediately, but within a couple months if you dont go back over them.

 

there is full penetration on the whole thing and i did leave about 1/16" of the weld itself on the pipe and gradually ground down....i just tried to make the whole thing look like a gradual transition from the big pipe to the smaller one....i should take a pic of the inside because there is a line of penetration through the whole thing....