1980 Austin Princess mild custom - 1951 Lanchester LD10

I've got a very faded suction-cup Garfield if you want him.

glenanderson: You know, I could have sworn I had a spare of exactly that type but do you think I can find it? Happy to rehome it.

PhilA: Yes! A faded Garfield would be ridiculously appropriate.

blackpopracing: No external gutters on the Maestro, sadly... however... the Lanchester used to have a roofrack, you can see the dimples where it was clamped on the gutters and while we weren't planning to fit one if that Desmo unit is looking for a home I can't think of a much better car for it. I can't promise I won't use it as 'temporary' garage storage though.

You'll all have to let me know prices, postage, etc. so I can square it all away. Chuck me a PM for all that jazz.

I wouldn't use it without the boss, as the exposed metal parts are likely to be live. I would think it needs support too.

I would have thought a man of your abilities could fashoin a bit of sheet to go straight up the front and fold over to meet the original panel. A bit of CAD and a hunk of sheet chopped out of something lying about. Obviously, it would be easier with the welder working to fabricate it, but chicken-and-egg aside, folding something simple to pop rivet in place would be better than leaving it exposed.

Wood would be fine.

Nearest thing to hardwood I've got is some roof joist offcuts (nobody tidied up in the loft when the central heating was installed decades ago), not sure what wood it is exactly but seems a good bit harder than the fence beams left overs.

Guinness label when I were a lad....

It's not going well.



Reassembled the welder, all nice and as smart as it'll ever be, and decided to test it to make sure it was working. Gas feed is fine, powers up no problem, decided to get some good unkinked wire into the torch to see what happened.

It took several attempts to get the wire to feed, I adjusted the tension on the wire reel and the feed rollers until it was as smooth as I could get it and eventually the wire got all the way to the torch tip. Just to be sure, fed some more through and then it snagged as per the above picture.

Unthread the wire, check everything is straight so there's nothing impeding the wire, check the screw on part of the torch is aligned properly at the case and attempt to rethread it. Attempt again. And again. Unscrew the torch and find that as the wire comes through the torch boss that's attached to the machine, there's just enough space inside the boss for the wire to then not line up with the torch guide hole. Manually align the wire with both holes, screw the torch back onto the boss, and try again.

Wire feeds good, nice and even, let's try striking up on some metal and hope nothing bad happens. Two tacks struck no bother, and then no wire feed at all. Check in the case and find this mess.


Try and clean it all out and find its properly jammed in there. Have to remove the torch to get it all out and find the brass tube that you have to trim down to suit your machine has also come loose (it's held in by bending the tube, there's no other way to fix it in place, as per the instructions). Wire feed is now jerky and I cannot get it to run smoothly.


I don't know what I've done here. I feel like I've wasted a lot of time and some money and I've gone from having a welder that was one of the nicest I've ever used to basically being a new shelf in the garage.

I cannot get anything to run smoothly anymore. Perhaps a new wire feed mechanism would help, perhaps getting a new welder (out of budget currently) would be the better solution. I don't know. I need to have a think about this because right now what little confidence I did have doing this job that's out of my comfort zone is now completely gone.

What does the wire look like? - it's not gone rusty on the drum has it?

It’s obviously snagging somewhere.

Silly question, but do you have the torch cable out straight from the welder while you’re doing the tests. No tight bends or kinks?