Last week I described how, after walking myself up the welding-equipment ladder and deciding that in order to fix the broken driver’s-side engine mount on Kugel, my ’72 2002tii, I needed to buy not only a welder but a a MillerMatic 211 MIG welder, I walked myself right back down when I calculated that by the time I bought the welder, the auto-darkening mask, the gas bottle, and the cart, I’d be laying out about $1,500—and that didn’t factor in the learning curve.
I decided that if the primary goal was simply to get the car put back together to free up the lift and the garage space, I’d be better off simply paying someone to weld the subframe mount. My friend Lindsey offered to weld it at his shop. I started thinking about dropping the subframe off with him at the start of the week. Then, last Saturday morning, I got a call from my friend Tom Samuelson. Tom and I have done road trips to the Vintage together, loaned each other tools, towed cars for each other—in other words, we’re good car-guy friends. Tom was up on the twists and turns of the subframe saga from my Facebook posts. (I have very few secrets.)
“Throw the thing in the trunk of your car, drive it up to Marblehead today, and I’ll weld it up for you,” he said. “I’m around all day.”
Then he added, “I have a MillerMatic 211—the one you’re talking about buying. You can kick the tires, maybe even take it for a test drive if you want.”
Boy, I liked the sound of that.
The front subframe isn’t monstrously heavy, but it ain’t exactly light, either, and it’s a bit ungainly—somewhat resembling the demon spawn of an anvil, a drill press, and a bunch of coat hangers. I measured it and verified that it would indeed fit in the trunk of the E39 530i if I folded the rear seats down, so I backed the E39 into the garage and pre-positioned the subframe on the floor jack. (By the way, one of the things that makes the E39 work as a daily driver, replacing the cavalcade of 318ti hatchbacks and E39 and E46 wagons that preceded it, is the fact that the rear seats fold down, enabling this kind of subframe-swallowing functionality.)
As it happened, two of my brothers-in-law had come over for a barbecue that day, so I roped them into helping me move the subframe into the trunk. I began to raise the floor jack and asked them to steady the subframe, and to help guide it in when it was level with the trunk. But with a hand on each side of the subframe, they asked, “Why? Is it heavy?”—and before waiting for my answer, they simply lifted it into the trunk. Of course, my brother-in-law Sean is a firefighter, and I am a 98-pound weakling.
I ticked off the 30 or so miles up to Tom’s house in Marblehead. When I arrived, he was working on an MGB GT for a couple of friends. We easily yanked the subframe out of the E39’s trunk. My brothers-in-law were right; it really wasn’t as heavy as I thought.
Tom explained that a good portion of proper welding is preparation. He degreased the surrounding area with acetone—“Never use brake cleaner to clean something you’re going to weld,” he said. “When combined with welding heat, it can generate phosgene gas”—used a small grinder to get down to a bare-metal finish, mated the broken piece back into the crack, then very carefully measured both the offset from the engine mount’s vertical face as well as the distance to the steering box.
He then did something I found surprising. Using the grinder, he beveled the edges of both the frame and the broken-off piece, but not in a way to make them overlap; instead, the intent was to make them face each other, like two arrowheads touching point-to-point. Tom explained that this allows a larger amount of welding material to fill the area surrounding the joint than if the original cracked piece was simply mated up to where it had cracked off. It seemed counter-intuitive to me at first, but it made sense once I thought about it.
We then temporarily unbolted the steering box, leaving the Pitman arm attached to the center track rod and simply swinging the steering box out of the way to gain clearance.
Tom then gave me a quick tour of the MillerMatic 211. The machine has what Miller calls “auto-set,” which allows you to simply set the thickness of the welding wire that the machine spools out, and dial in the thickness of the metal you’re welding; the machine sets the appropriate parameters for the electrical current and the speed of the wire feed. Tom took some scrap metal and laid down a few test beads to verify that the settings didn’t need to be tweaked.
A few small tack welds were made to hold the cracked-off piece in place. The distances to the vertical and to the steering box were carefully measured, and the piece was tapped slightly to align it. Then Tom welded the cracked piece back in place, laying down beads on both the front and back sides.
I elected to be an observer and let Tom to the work. Considering the number of things going on in his garage, and that he was squeezing me in on a Saturday, expedience seemed to be in service of the greater good.
After the piece was welded front and back and its alignment was verified again, the reinforcement piece from Ireland Engineering was welded in place. When the welding was done, Tom shot a quick coat of rust-inhibiting primer on the welded pieces; then, after allowing the primer to quick-dry, he gave it a blast of black Rustoleum.
Finally, Tom and I muscled the subframe back into my E39’s trunk. We triumphantly cracked a cold one, and talked cars, projects, and life for twenty minutes—the good stuff. I thanked my friend profusely for his time and expertise, and beat it on back to Newton.
In the morning, I began re-installing the subframe back into Kugel, who had been sitting up on the lift with his engine strapped to a 2x4 across the top of the engine bay. There’s really not that much holding the front subframe into a vintage car; on a 2002, it’s the six main bolts attaching it to the frame rails, the two nuts affixing the steering flex disc to the steering box, and the two engine mounts. That’s really about it.
Gravity certainly helped the subframe come out—and certainly fought its going back in. Trying to line up all ten of those attachment points was like trying to arrange the tentacles of a dead octopus with rigor mortis. This was all made more difficult by the fact that the center of gravity of the subframe is such that it doesn’t really balance on the jack pad of the lift without having to keep one hand on it to stop it from tipping. The front sway bar (which was still attached to the subframe) seemed to want to hit the underside of the nose before the two studs on the steering box would slide into the holes in the steering flex disc. Unbolting the sway bar end links and tipping the sway bar downward gave me room to maneuver.
Finally, with me feeling like I’d lost a bar fight with a lumberjack wielding a pipe wrench, Kugel’s subframe was installed. I reattached the front struts to the ball joints and buttoned up the safety wire.
So, the Great Use The Broken Subframe Engine Mount To Force The Purchase Of A Welder experiment ended without the purchase of a welder—but with me having learned a bit about welders and welding. The subframe mount was repaired correctly (at virtually zero cost), I spent a few hours with a good car-guy friend, we quaffed a cold beer or two, and the subframe has been re-installed. I’d call that an unqualified success.—Rob Siegel
Rob’s first book, Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic, and his new book, The Hack Mechanic Guide to European Automotive Electrical Systems, are available through Bentley Publishers, Amazon, ECS Tuning, and Bavarian Autosport—or you can get personally inscribed copies through Rob’s website: www.robsiegel.com.
