Hi,
I have a brick barbecue involving a number of mesh grids. These have turned out to be insufficiently stiff for the gaps they need to span, especially when weight and heat are added. So I've been stiffening them up by welding some scrap steel strip round the outside and across the middle. On a plain steel grid this has worked very well, but I now have to deal with the stainless-steel top grill that the food sits on.
I'm a very amateur welder, with no instruction and not a great deal of experience. Basically, I bought a £50 arc welder from Machine Mart last year to build the various other metal parts of the barbecue (lid, hinge mounts, etc), and have done a few other odd jobs with it since. I have a couple of boxes of "ordinary" electrodes in different sizes.
What I want to know is whether I'm likely to be OK welding some steel (believed to be mild steel; it's from an old garden gate) strip onto my stainless steel mesh. Clearly this doesn't require aircraft grade weld quality; as long as the two stay together and keep my sausages out of the fire I'm happy. If at all possible I'd like to avoid buying any special electrodes for this one small job.
I don't want to suck it and see because I'd end up messing up the edges of my (not cheap) stainless grid for nothing if it turned out that such a weld was completely impossible with the equipment, electrodes, and skills at hand. I don't have the knowledge or experience to judge if that's likely to be the case.
Cheers,
Pete