I just wanted to put up a quick update. Yesterday evening (in my "off" hours) I started working on the second runner (I'm not sure that they're called this, but that's what I'm going to call them!). At first things seemed to be going a lot faster than on Saturday, but then everything started falling apart. I had found some smaller welding rods and was using them thinking that they would be easier to use (since the metal I'm welding isn't very thick), but they ended up, in the end, working against me. They didn't seem to penetrate the metal as well as the bigger rods, meaning that after I had everything tacked together and started checking measurements, all my welds started coming undone. Yes, things went faster, but I had to keep doing them over again.
I finally figured out that the slightly larger rods worked better, even though they seemed too big for the thickness of metal I was working with. By the end of the night I kind of got the hang of stick welding again, and figured out what I had been doing wrong. MIG welding is different, and since that's the only kind of welding I've done for a long time, I pretty much forgot how much it differs from using a stick welder. Anyway, short story long, I got the second "runner" finished and looking better (to my eyes) than the first one. Now all I've got to do is make the mounting brackets for it, paint everything a nice shade of black, mount it all on the car, and take it for a spin!
Side note: A stick welder works great(!) for doing fill welds, but MIG will always rule when it comes to welding 11mm nuts onto anything (and that's a fact!).
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