These are exciting times. Welding
has finally begun. We took the plunge last night and tack welded together the four L-tubes, which form the
nose of the Locost space frame.
The first piece of the Locost ever welded
We actually started the evening by tack welding spacers onto one of the differential brackets.
As I mentioned earlier, these are non-structural welds, and that's probably a good thing.
We had the welder set for 16GA steel and these pieces were way thicker, so there wasn't
a lot of melted metal other than the gobs of melted filler wire. But the spacers are where they
should be and they won't be going anywhere, and I still think the bracket looks better than it would if we
just glued the spacers in place. You may feel otherwise.
Tubes locked in the jig, ready for the big moment
The preferred method for building a Locost space frame has you starting with the ten tubes that form the base of the
structure. However, this requires that you have a build table. We don't. We do however have a nose jig,
therefore ergo sum our choice to start our welding journey with the nose. We loaded the L-tubes into
the jig and clamped them down, and we were pretty confident at this point that no matter what happened we had
the necesssary experience and skill to cut four more L-tubes, should we happen to totally mess up the
welding part.
Side tube looks misalinged, but isn't really
During all of our tacking practice, we always tacked up all four sides of a tube that we were planning to weld. Since we couldn't get to
all four sides of the L-tubes with them loaded in the jig, we just tacked two seams at each end of the top tube, and one at
each end of the bottom tube. We then carefully pried the nose out of the jig, using a large rubber hammer
instead of the usual large steel one, with the idea that we would finish tacking the joints once the fragile nose was
free of the jig.
Small step, but a giant leap for mankind. Or not.
Amazingly, though, the nose turned out to be really strong with just six tack welds. Even more amazing, the thing was
perfectly straight, and I was pretty sure that trying to tack anything else would change that in a hurry.
So we're good. The nose is done, at least until it's all attached to the frame and it's time to fully weld
all the joints. The tack welds on the nose may not be the greatest, but they work, and we should get a lot
better at this welding business in the future. We'd almost have to.
On a brighter note, our Star Wars boycott turned out to be a huge success (see post from March 1, 2012).
George Lucas has abandoned his plans to build a giant media center along one of the most beloved back roads
of Marin County. He cited complaints from neighbors, but I think we all know what the threat of a boycott
can do. George, whatever your reasons you did the right thing. Motorcyclists and sports car enthusiats
everywhere salute you. And our Locost will now proudly bear the Lucas name on all of its electrical
components. At least until they fail.
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