VF69HARDTOP said

Love your work on this car, nothing but top shelf.

Can I ask what you use to grind your welds down and finish them so well? You can't see where your even welded them. Im slowly fitting new lower rear quarters on my Aussie built VF Valiant hardtop and Im having a hard time grinding the welds back to a nice finish.

Thanks mate

Sure lets see if I can help you out, I was going out to the garage this evening to knock down the weld for my lengthening part of my quarter panel,

Like the other side cut the quarter at the same spot,





Then make the piece to splice on and clamp in place, and weld up with the blower in the other hand and keep everything cool,









Now I ran a narrow weld down the backside of the weld to fill the areas that you can see don't have full penetration just because I had access to the back side and it would insure a pinhole free seam and did this while I had the unground weld on the front side to prevent blow thru's.
Most of the previous welds that you seen ground down nicely didn't have this benefit but I made sure I had as much penetration as I could get.





Now to the grinding process these are the weapons of choice for me,

-An angle grinder with flapper discs, I use 60 grit

- A die grinder with a stone disc

- A mini angle grinder with quick change discs ( 60grit, 80grit, 100grit)



I like to use the stone set on an angle and ride the top of the weld taking it down about 85 percent, the nice thing about this is you can remove most of the weld without touching and removing any of the adjacent sheet metal,



Then I switch to the grinder with the flapper disc and take it down to about 95 percent,



Then I switch to the mini grinder and work my way thru from 60grit down to 100 grit and by this point the weld is pretty much invisible, then I switch to a medium coarse scuff pad and that usually look pretty decent. It sounds like a lot of work but once your finished with the stone the other steps go pretty fast.





At this point its safe to grind down the backside weld but I left a little bit more meat on it since its not seen.

Hope that helps out some, and that's a great looking Valiant looks like its pretty solid, have you got a resto thread started? Like to keep and eye on your progress.

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