MTFCA Forum

Upon repairing the Coupe passenger door, i noticed what looks like two spot welds.
The outer green skin had two round holes which I figured were just rust holes but when I removed the really bad part, I found that the inner structure had separated from the skin. So, I was wondering, "Did Henry start using spot welds late in T production?" Then I remembered that the driver door came from a Model T donor but the passenger door came from a Model A truck. Perhaps someone else knows.

I have looked over my late '27 T quite carefully, and the only weld in the car that I could find was on the battery rack. I had done the welding as a repair to it.

Yes. Ford was electric spot welding since at least 1913.

Mostly fenders then, but when body builds were in house, lots of spot welds were used.


Ford Methods and the Ford Shops




The Ford Industries booklet

Oh yeah, lots of spot welds on my 26 Coupe body. Cowl to firewall, trunk lid skin, etc. etc.

Thanks for the responses. I fixed it with three plug welds.
But you're gonna luv what A.I. has to say:

"AI" equals automated incompetence or automated idiocy. Google was always questionable in its quick answers, however, in the past year they have become laughably unreliable.
Yeah, Henry used electrical spot welding going way back.

Absolutely Ford used spot welding. The body of my 21 Touring was joined together at the lower section at the rear doors using three spot welds. And by the way the spot welds were pretty good. You could barely see them when Ford painted the bodies.
The A I cloud geniuses are about as bright as the T photos that get posted from time to time elsewhere on other sites. The photos of the classic car era cars are a lot worse than the T era if that’s possible. Isn’t progress interesting!

The AI output in search engines is nothing more than a machine generated summary of the target subject collected from various data sources across the web. Despite the name, or presumption, there is no intelligence, there is no proofing, it merely is garbage in garbage out...it just does it faster.
The old adage of not believing everything you read on the web still holds true, regardless of anyone trying to convince you the "I" in AI is actually operative....

Long before Artificial Intelligence AI stood for artificial insemination in the field of animal breeding. That works well.
Back in the 1970's The protocol for the export of sheep semen from Australia to the USA was developed, specifically to allow US breeders access to the Moorit brown gene in our flock of coloured merinos and also coloured Corriedales.
Allan from down under.

Google AI works by using machine learning algorithms and vast amounts of data to analyze patterns, make predictions, and generate content.
Putting that in common English: It searchs the internet and compiles the most common answers to the question presented and formulates the answer in one or more English sentences. It isn't really a new thing. "Alexa" (Google), "Siri" (iPhone) are earlier AI forms.

Much depends on how the question is presented So Henry Ford did not spot weld his employees did

Here's my vote to ban AI references from the forum.

From spot welds to artificial insemination!
Wow!
I disassembled a large amount of my 26 Tudor. Lots of spot welds in various places in the inner body structure.

Bryant

Perhaps the most annoying spot welds are the ones that fix the top panel into the radiator shroud. It's OK on steel shells that are painted. They are easily filled over. They require far more finesse to smooth them out if plating a brass shell is intended.

Allan from down under.

Just another tidbit detail of model Ts having spot welds.
The move to slowly updating the bodies and style of the model T, for 1915 Ford moved to a small cowling surrounding a smaller firewall than in previous years. Prototypes had been hand made in the summer of 1914. However, production problems stamping out the body's large side panels with the small cowling in place proved to be difficult. These production problems resulted in hundreds of failed stampings, and lengthy delays in the manufacture of the 1915 open car bodies. As solutions were worked out, failed stampings were cut and spliced together.
My early 1915 runabout driver's side panel was spliced together through the rear of the fake door's bead overlapped and spot welded together. Workmanship putting it together was very nicely done.
A lot of 1915 and 1916 runabouts and touring cars are spliced through the fake door.