Lower repaired..

[dwalker460]

So yesterday I picked up a lower with a broken trigger guard tab from another member. This morning I went in to the shop and welded it up. I read Tinelements thread about his repair and followed a similar path, with a few differences.
So step one was to strip the lower back down and clean the coating off the area to be welded. A little wipedown with some alcohol, some wet shop towels, and away we went.

It took a couple of minutes to weld as I would weld, cool, weld, cool, slowly building up new metal.

Once that was done, I ground the repair to its rough shape rather than chuck it in a mill. This was for two reasons- first, the mill I use is a PITA to setup and not physically in my shop, which means I have to drive over there and setup, which was more trouble than I wanted to deal with. Second, going over and using the mill would have lead to a three hour conversation about racing, good ole days, and someones random ex-wife, which was also more trouble than I wanted to deal with.

Once roughed in, I drilled the roll pin hole and used a 3m wheel and hand files to finish it out. This actually did not take long at all. Once the right shape and flat a little 300grit sandpaper wrapped around the file blade smoothed the metal right out but left enough roughness for the paint to bite.

Last thing I did was to tape it off and paint it with semi-flat black Krylon paint of some sort I already had in the shop. Matched perfectly.

All said and done, this whole process probably took me about an hour, from welding, roughing, and finishing with a few interruptions in there along the way.

I am not much of a picture taken, so all I really have is the "before" and "after" shots, which will get posted in a few minutes after I upload them.

Before-


During paint-





After-





All in all, this was a lot of easy and nothing at all to be concerned about.