Welding with Car Batteries

[fabricator]

This has saved us several times on the trail.
Finally found a good article on it
thought I would pass it on
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Just remove the two batteries from the vehicles, and hook the positive terminal on the first battery to the negative terminal on the second battery. This will hook up the two batteries in series, yielding 24 Volts of power.
Once you've got the juice flowing from one battery to the next, you need to harness all those cold cranking amps and put them to work for you as a welder. For this you'll need another set of jumper cables (or a first set if you've used a battery cable to hook the two batteries in series). Hook up the negative lead of the cables to the empty negative terminal, with the other end attached to the work piece. Hook the positive cable to the empty positive terminal, with the other end clamping the electrode. At this point (after protecting your eyes, of course) you can go ahead and stike the arc to begin welding.


Article is here..........
http://www.4x4wire.com/isuzu/minutemods/welder/

[GPER]

That is a very good write up.

[94Dodge Truggy]

How about 3 batteries?

[Nuts]

how long can you weld like that before the batteries die, on how thick of metal,and can you just use a normal welding rod?...why is the sky blue and how come its still cold out when the sun is shining,lol

[itbrokeagain]

It works very well. Can be done with as many batteries as you need. The more juice you have the thicker the steel. Repaired a shackle mount on atomic ridge at Windrock this way.

[carwash]

just dont forget the 3-4 pairs of sunglasses...

[fabricator]

How about 3 batteries?

2 have been plenty hot enuf on either of my trail fixes

welds pretty good, was surprised....

[JET455]

there are even some spool guns on the market that you can hook to the batteries. Makes it nice to be wire feed out on the trail....

[GPER]

How about 3 batteries?

They say three is even better.

[carwash]

well, then i'm going to use four.

[GPER]

well, then i'm going to use four.

I'm going to make more jumper cables so I can use five

[wilson1010]

I'm going to make more jumper cables so I can use five

Need a couple of short cables with terminal clamps and one set of long jumpers. But, that 2 guage wire is spendy!

[GPER]

Need a couple of short cables with terminal clamps and one set of long jumpers. But, that 2 guage wire is spendy!

I still have a bunch of the hot wire off of the cranes from when I worked down at Armco or AK now.

I made my jumpers out of it years ago so I could pull in behind a car and still have enough cable to reach the batteries.

[highlandercj-7]

I carry a welding kit consisting of a pair of cutting goggles with a shade 10 lens, a nomex hood to protect the face, welding gloves, an assortment of electrodes and a few 1' long wires with battery terminals at each end to connect 3 car batteries, then I use my HD jumper cables to weld with. 3 batteries making 36 volts works much better to get the arc to work. We welded a coil-over mount back onto my friends bronco and it worked great.
I recommend 1/8" rods because with them amps it turned the whole thing red using 1/16" rods. We burned through 6 rods and every battery still had enough juice to run there vehicles.