Everyone wants to have nice looking welds, myself included. Once you've had some practice, it's usually not too hard to make them look halfway decent as long as you're working with clean material. But in the last few years during my travels around the internet, I've noticed some bashing of welds that sometimes didn't look all that horrible to me. Certainly, some welds make you wonder why they didn't play with the settings a little more before trying to burn whatever they were working on together, but we all have to start somewhere. But setting the really obviously bad ones aside, is it really all that important to have your welds look like your only job is TIG welding titanium headers together for a Formula one team? Let's take a look at how the pro's do it.

This is the tube frame of a Porsche 917 built in the 1970's. Designed to be ultra light weight, the frame was only about 93 lbs. Now before you have a heart attack looking at the massive gobs of weld, they were using high tech (at the time at least) magnesium alloy, and apparently had issues welding the tubes together.

“The first chassis they made broke after a couple of hours of testing at [Porsche development centre] Weissach,” says van Lennep. “That second chassis they drove, I think, for 10 or 12 hours. It was difficult welding at the joints, so they had put a sort of sleeve over it and welded on that. The third was ours.”



By the looks of it, the tubing joints were not the only places they had issues with the welds. Also if you will notice in the upper left of the picture, you will see a short section of tube that was welded together. Perhaps they forgot that piece till after it would fit easily and resorted to cutting it. Or they just used some left over pieces to stick it together.

Also, we should remember that this was awhile ago and I'm sure there's been some improvement in welding technology. But regardless, I would say these are pretty rough looking welds for a manufacturer like Porsche. Granted they weren't as big of an operation in the 70's as they are now. But these were top of the line race machines at the time. Not some back yard projects. It was big bucks, high tech stuff.


Another weld is seen here on this MG Metro 6r4 rally car from the 80's. Not exactly the most perfect looking, although the two pieces are stuck together as intended. Many if not all of these cars were built in a rush, so it's not surprising they weren't so fussy about how the welds looked. If you look at the factory welds of street cars, done mostly by robots these days, even they aren't perfect. Sometimes even if you try to do everything right, some contamination in the metal that you couldn't see can mess up a perfect looking  bead.

So if you're one of the people who thinks you'll never have those perfect looking welds, just remember even professional race car builders for top level teams don't always have stuff looking that good. The more you do something, the better you'll get. But I think having perfect weld beads on everything is unrealistic. A decent weld doesn't have to look super fancy to work. -Don