I'm interested in Jon G's reply. I worked on a farm in high-school. We had one of those standard big oxy-acetylene torch rigs. All we ever did was cut stuff up with it. It was years before I found out you can put stuff together with it too.
Welding has always been voodoo to me. I've never had the guts to get a welder and try it out.
One time when I visited the Army Ordnance school at Ft Lee I got to tour the welding training facility. They let us play with a virtual reality MIG welder. The machine was a giant size mockup with all the knobs for settings. It had a special pistol/torch and a VR helmet. When you got the pistol in position and pulled the trigger you would see the spark in the helmet. It even made the appropriate welding noises. The computer captured your performance. When I finished they replayed my weld on the big screen that showed all the appropriate readouts for speed, temperature, penetration etc. Really cool stuff. Soldiers/students were required to pass certain performance tests on it before they could play around with real metal. Really great training tool all in the comfort of an air conditioned classroom.
All that being said, I'm more mystified by the metal shaping, body panel forming process. That really is voodoo. 😱
