Thanks guys for you nice comments. Dale- As you say, tig welding has been a mixed blessing for me. I have had to take a part back out to them as many as 5 time to try and get it built up enough or to fill holes. One of the brothers who does my welding is very consciencious and tries hard to give me just what I want, the other one acts like I am a bother to him and he is the one who gives me fits. I always pay them well, in cash, for whatever they do for me, usually during a slow day or during their break. I'm not sure if this has any bearing on the quality of the work, but they are always using cut wire from the wire welder to flow into the parts they tig weld for me. It has a coating on it that I figured would just melt off and burn away, but maybe it doesn't. To their credit, both of them have been real good about re-doing welds and patching up things for me. I never have to pay them twice. I have not had aqny problem bluing over their welds.

I think tig welding COULD be the answer to all our welding problems but whoever does it needs to understand it completely and be very proficient at before good results can be expected from it. I really think that most of the problems I have had have been due to not setting the heat right on the machine. The kinds of small parts I have had welded should not have taken too much heat to fuse things together.

One problem I encountered was strictly my own fault, I turned out a filler ring to have tig welded into the extractor cut outs to build them up. Without thinking, I used a piece of old Mauser barrel as donor material. After welding that thing was HARD ! I annealed it but it was still stubborn to cut the new grooves in it. Bob H.