A few questions...

Hey Max, I have been reading the books by Carrol Smith that we talked about. Thanks for telling me about them, they have answered so many questions, I hope that everyone that reads this goes out and buys these books immediately! Tune To Win and Engineer To Win are awesome books to read. I have also been reading Metals and How To Weld Them from Lincoln Electric, another good metalurgy book. My few questions are these, doing what we do (i.e. bagging and body dropping trucks and cars) has there ever been a need for you to heat treat anything that you have built? I work with aluminum and we are always having to heat treat metals after fabricating tight bends and curves out of O metals. But until I read these books I never knew that you had to heat treat anything for automotive use. So I was just wondering, out of everything that you have built if you have ever had to get anything heat treated? My other question after reading another thread on here is this, when building tubular control arms is it ok to mig weld them or should they always be tig welded?
I am about to order Prepare To Win by Carroll Smith just to see what he has to say in that book as well. Reading these books you would swear that he was an aviation sheetmetal guy but he has been racing since the mid 50s. I would love to sit down with this guy and pick his brain for a few hours! haha.

Yeah, I would love to meet Carroll for sure. I hope he realizes how much he's helped people out with his books. I don't heat treat or stress relieve anything. I got into a online spat over this on a different forum site and did a ton of homework on the subject. Everyone was simply talking shit on me without having information to back up what they were saying. Needles to say, I left the site and will never return. Most of the welding engineers I've talked to agree that heat treating and stress relieving ferrous weldments is unnecessary. For what we do 4130 is unnecessary and mild steel is a non heat treatable material anyways, so in most cases it would be a waste of resources. There are a few tools that I've made that I've case-hardened in the shop with a torch, but that doesn't really count.

Umm, Carrol Smith passed away in 2003.

And apparently I created a new profile while trying to log in today. Lol. I must say, that I do enjoy his books very much. I keep them in a drawer at the shop and I sometimes reference them before diving into something new.