[DD1]

Okay, so after starting off with a really lazy Sunday morning, I finally got motivated to do some work. First, I wanted to modify my air compressor. I am going to add another tank that someone gave me so they will work in tandem. As it figures, I did not have all of the right fittings, so I moved on to the truck.

Now, common sense took the better of me, and this is quite unusual; I usually go head first into stuff and get in trouble later on. I decided that instead of doing my first real welding since my class on the floor pan, I would practice on something that is more forgiving, and to some extent expendable.

So, I decided to do a small patch job on part of an inner fender. I cut a piece of patch metal from an inner fender that I purchased but will not be using, and it's not worth it to pay to ship it back.

In the attached pics, you will see my progress. I went to my friend Eric's house to start the job, because he has a bench grinder and I have not mounted my bench vise to my work table as yet. I cut and fit the metal, and he was going to just do a couple of tack welds with his flux wire welder. Then he ended up doing a lot of tack welds, and sort of doing a good part of the job for me.

Took it back to my house, and tried to patch up the remaining parts that needed work. I had to put a piece of metal on the back of some holes as I was only making them worse. In some cases I tried to "fix" a small hole, and ended up making a bigger one. But hey, that was the whole point of doing it this way - to get used to using my welder and get some practice. I stopped around 8pm after making one final hole in the fender.

Here are the pics. They should be in chronological order. The pics when I was working on it alone are in the next post.