Custom Harley Fuel Tank (jakeru's #11)

[jakeru]

I TIG welded some mounting lugs for a customer's fuel tank for a custom Harley Davidson Motorcycle. The mounting lugs were a kit the customer had purchased, which were milled out of pretty substantial billet steel stock. The fuel tank was purchased, apparently fabricated out of sheetmetal (cold rolled steel.) It had some nice lines and compound curves to it.

So this job was to install the mounting lugs onto the fuel tank. I advised the customer how to cut out the sheetmetal and jig up the mounting lugs for me and bring them to me for welding. He did pretty good with it. Fit-up wasn't totally tight but, good enough for what it needs to do.


I started by depositing four small tack welds, then removed the holding fixtures and make sure they were in the proper position.


There were some gaps in the fit-up, but nothing a little filler rod (ER70S6, 1/16" and 3/32") couldn't take care of. I used DC pulsing with 50% background current, 50% duty cycle, peak current 200 amps, with footpedal to control the actual current. These welds are on the underside of the tank so are not going to be visible, so I didn't go crazy trying to make them look nice. In fact I welded everything without repositioning the tank on my table even once.


I used a stubby #8 gas lens with 15 cfh argon, and a sharpened 3/32" tungsten. After doing a lot of aluminum, it's fun to chance pace and do a nice clean mild steel fabrication job, for a change.

Here is another shot of the overall gas tank from the top view. I think the customer is going to have it powdercoated. It will be mounted to a custom Harley Davidson motorcycle, which I will probably be doing some other welding work on here soon, sweet.