July 4th. Outside, the neighbourhood is doing what neighbourhoods do: grilling meat, waving flags, preparing to set things on fire in a controlled and patriotic manner. Inside the tent, I'm setting up a welder.

The Easy Flux 125 from Harbor Freight. Titanium series. One of the most highly rated machines at the cheap end of the spectrum, which is exactly my end of the spectrum. I plugged it in, fed the wire, pulled the trigger, and it worked. Just like that. No drama. No sparks flying in the wrong direction. No tent fire. For this build, that qualifies as a miracle.

I also got a helmet with automatic shade, and I need to talk about this for a moment. My previous welding experience was with a rod-based machine and a helmet with a fixed dark lens, which meant you were either blind from the arc or blind from the shade, with no middle ground. The auto-darkening helmet is heaven compared to that particular hell. You can actually see what you're doing, which turns out to be rather important when you're joining metal together.

I started around 2pm. Late, but the morning had other claims on it. The plan was simple: weld the inner structure pieces together, side by side, without attaching anything to the car itself. No front-to-side connections, no cross-bracing. Measurements first. Always measurements first. I just needed solid left and right assemblies ready to go.

My welding was not super clean. I'll be honest about that. The beads were uneven, the lines weren't perfectly straight, and if you looked closely at the inner door section you'd find a few moments where my hand clearly wasn't sure what it was doing. But the joints were solid. Every single one. Messy and strong beats pretty and weak, and since most of these surfaces will need fabrication anyway to account for the slight misalignments between panels, perfection was never the goal. Learning was the goal. And I learned a lot in five hours.