During my current job-challenged situation I've been doing some work for a friend, putting up steel buildings. The buildings have tin roofs, and we have found that it's a lot easier to screw the roofs down if you drill holes in the tin sheets beforehand so you know where the screws go. So we stack up the sheets and drill all the holes at the same time.
Well yesterday my friend got his measurements wrong and drilled holes in the wrong spot in 44 sheets. He was really stressed because the last time he did this it cost him $250 for just one replacement sheet. He saw the whole job going down the drain.
So I said, "I've got this mig welder, and I bet I can fill those holes." At that point he was ready to try anything. He came by to pick me up this morning and we loaded up the welder and all my stuff and drove the hour and a half down to Miami. He hammered me out a backing piece from a copper pipe, and I drilled lots of holes in a scrap sheet, and practiced for a while, and said, "Yeah, I can do this." So I spent the day spot welding about 500 holes closed, and then grinding them down. By the end of the day I was getting good enough to where I didn't have to do much grinding. Plus I was fast enough to keep up with the guys putting up the sheets.
Tomorrow I'll go around and fix a few pinholes I missed, and we'll prime and paint the welds. The cool thing is that because (complex reason here) on a different building we are going to have to pull off and reposition a whole bunch of tin sheets, unless there was somehow some way to trim them in place. And I said, "Well, I've got this plasma cutter..."
Dave Wilson