Welding precautions

[Colin HeseltineParticipant @colinheseltine48622]

Many moons ago I had removed fuel tank from a mini in order to weld up the bodywork prior to fitting a new rear subframe. Everything was completed, subframe back in, tank back in and all plumbed up and running great. Whilst car was over the pit I had a quick look round the front wheel arches and found a hole in the nearside arch near where it met the floor.

Front wheel off, out came the carpet, scraped off the underseal and proceeded to weld up said hole. Suddenly heard a whooshing noise and turned to see petrol running from somewhere by the tank into the pit. It was a nice stream of fire with a gradually expanding pool of fire on the pit floor. For some reason, and I cannot remember why I did not have an extinguisher. I just knew I had to put the fire out.

I had what was in reality a very stupid idea. I grabbed a load of rags I had lying around, hugged them to my stomach and jumped in the pit straight into the middle of the fire, landing on my stomach, basically a belly flop. My pit was a shallow one where you sat on a bench rather than standing up.

I frightened the fire so much that it blew out. I think I must have watched the John Wayne Hellfighters film a short while earlier where they put out fires by blowing explosives in them.

Main thing the fire was out even if my clothes were a little singed.

I bought a large 5Kg BCF extinguisher the next day.

This extinguisher came in very handy a few years later when I had a major equipment malfunction whilst welding. I was using a gas fluxer to provide liquid flux whilst brazing. I had used this for 4 or 5 years making suspension for a formula ford racing car or myself and others. I also used an economiser to control the oxygen and acetylene feed. This is basically a lever operated valve, when you want to use the torch lift it off the valve and then touch the pilot flame and get on with the job. I had turned gases on, lit pilot flame and opened the valve on the gas fluxer.

The screw holding the valve chose that moment to shear, the valve flew out the top along with 5 pints of extremely flammable flux, which immediately vapourized and met the pilot flame. This was followed by a great big explosion. I caught fire from the waist up, my dog who was in the garage with me did a runner out the back door. Up and over garage door folded outwards and flat garage roof lifted about a foot and dropped back down. Any paper in workshop was on fire, all plastic wrapped stuff was shrink wrapped and there were fires burning all over the place (there was at least 10 litres of cellulose paint in there, which very luckily did not catch fire, else it would have been a different story indeed). All the paintwork on doors and windows looked as though and old fashioned paint blowtorch had been used on them, all black and bubbled.

Was able to roll down lawn to put my fires out and then saw to the fires in garage before hijacking a passing motorist to take me to hospital. I can still picture the scene now 35 years later if I close my eyes, everything on fire all round me. The Fire Brigade were called by hospital but there was noting to do, but they did take the equipment away to find out why it had failed, they could not see any reason why the screw had sheared. I had a few funny looks a work two days later going in covered in burns.

It was my dads garage so few weeks later I had to fix the results and do some painting, repairs etc. At least still here to tell the tale and can laugh about it now. My friends down at the local garage were very shocked as they knew how well I looked after my tools and equipment, compared to some of them who just dropped stuff on floors and did not always look after stuff.

Colin

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