Grinding Down Welds On Sheet Metal

Using a grinding wheel on a weld.

Grinding down welds on sheet metal.

I ve always used angle grinding discs to finish welds but the ordinary grinding discs are very coarse and difficult to control so i tended to grind almost back to the parent metal then use a little body filler. But there s no getting around it. You must avoid touching the panels with the grinder as they can get too thin really fast using this tool. Welds tend to have dips up and down so holding the grinder at an angle could cause it to gouge into the metal.

Keep your grinding disc nearly parallel to the metal so the grinder smoothes out the edges of your weld even to the sheet metal. Grind it almost flush maybe leaving a very slight crown. The last step is to grind down the weld with a 3m reinforced weld grinding wheel. But the devil s in the details.

Join the ccrc community to access a huge library of instructional classic car restoration videos. At every process upstream most precision sheet metal fabricators employ at least some level of automation. To achieve this initial stock removal and if the surface finish is not essential the metal worker might choose to use a simple grinding wheel with an angle grinder. Grinding down a weld on a formed workpiece is and probably will remain an intensely manual operation.

The act of grinding can be deceivingly simple. Removing weld splatter without overgrinding 50 grit or finer. Better surface finish than a grinding wheel or fiber disc grit for grit. It s better to leave just a little extra rather than go to far.

High where overgrinding is a concern such as thin walled sheet metal. Hold the grinding disc as level as you can to the piece of metal.