Bumper Welding When the Stinger Broke

Sunday March 31, 2024 Guerneville CA.

Working on Skiddy’s bumper

It was bumper day. I got to work on the bumper right away. I set the old trailer hitch up to trim the ends up on the old trailer hitch I got from my brother so I could mount it on the piece of metal I had. I set it up on end to cut the bottom part first.

Plasma cutter

I bought a plasma cutter about a year ago so I used that to trim the trailer hitch down to fit. I’m not too good at making real straight cuts with the plasma cutter yet, but I do have a grinder to fix things up.

Once I’d trimmer both ends of the bumper off I used this grinder to tidy up the cuts.

Welding

Then I used the arc welder to weld the trimmer trailer hitch to the piece of metal. I just tacked it on for now and will weld it up later after I drill some holes in it.

Drilling holes

Then I put the bumper back on the machine so I could drill some half inch holes to mount the bumper to the machine as it will be bolted to the machine so all the holes had to line up. I did slip and scraped my knuckles which got things a bit bloody, but that’s part of the game when drilling large holes in metal. I should wear gloves more.

The bumper

I got the holes drilled and here’s what the bumper looks like so far. This is only the start of it. I will add a bunch more stuff to protect the back of the rig before I’m finished with it. It’s looking good so far. It has to be beefy to keep  it from breaking when I back into a tree.

Welding it up

The next step was to take the bumper off and set it up so I could weld it all up as it was just tacked so far. Just as I started to weld it up, the electrical cable that attaches to the stinger broke off so I couldn’t do any more welding until I fixed the stinger.

The stinger

I tried to take the old stinger apart, but it was so old it just wouldn’t come apart so I could put the wire cable back in it. I was able to take another stinger off another welder and get things going again. The stinger is what holds the welding rods. The one at the top is the replacement and the one on the bottom is the old one I couldn’t get apart. You can see the old one is well used.

I welded everything up on the bumper so it would be cool when I work on it again.

Sunset

I got done just before dark and was sitting in my chair taking it easy after all the work, when the sun went down. That’s pretty good for here as most of the time our sunsets are just blue sky.

Nice day.