Fixing a Failed Skid Steer Arm Repair

I have a quick project to do today.

There is a crack in the loader arm of my skid steer. This was repaired by the previous owner. They did a repair on both arms, but on the other side they added a fish plate to make it stronger. I’m not sure why they didn’t do that on both sides. Regardless, I have to get it fixed! As I was using the snowblower today, I noticed that I was flopping around a little bit, and then I realized the whole weld had cracked. 

I cleaned up and tacked the top and bottom so that as I’m grinding through and removing all of this material, it doesn’t fall out and become misaligned. I’m not sure exactly how this whole thing is assembled. The lower part is a solid piece of steel, and I’m assuming the upper part is just a piece of rectangular tubing. I have to open this up, get rid of the weld and get it back to its starting point. 

I’m going to do that with an angle grinder because I don’t have a plasma torch even though I thought I did. But it’s not too much material to get through. 

I think that should be good enough to get in there with my welding rod and get this buttoned up better than before. 

Here’s a closer look at the porosity in these welds. You can see all those little tiny dots, which are air pockets inside the weld. For a woodworking comparison, that’s kind of like a Gorilla Glue or polyurethane glue which expands as its curing. A lot of people thing that makes it a good gap filler, and while it technically does fill the gaps, it’s not as structurally strong as something that isn’t foamy. That’s similar to what’s going on here; that weld is not nearly as strong as it would be if it was solid. The porosity is typically caused by impurities. So that can happen if the weld was dirty, if the shielding gas wasn’t shielding, the wind was blowing, there wasn’t enough gas, or the welder was too far away from the weld with the gun. 

I’m going to tack up the back a little bit first, and then kind of roll it to the other side and start filling the valley on the other side. 

That’s my first root pass, and I’m going to go again with 60/11 to fill this in. It was hard to gauge where everything was, so my beads are all over the place. After my second pass, I’ll start capping with 70/18. 

I’m going to make a fish plate next. I made a template of the one that’s on the other side so that they end up more or less matching. I have some quarter inch thick bar stock, so I’ll cut this shape out of the bar stock and get it prepped to go on the skid steer. 

Now that it’s cut out, I’ll weld it on to the arm. 

Here is the finished plate. I have a pretty good amount of undercut on here still, so I could have probably done another pass, but I think it’s fine as it is. I’m going to go through and put my final bead on the bottom, and then I have the top to deal with. 

Here’s the top. It has a little bit undercut, but again I’m not super worried about it. I’m going to do a little bit of grinding to clean up, then check if there’s any distortion. 

All right, here is the completed repair. It’s at least better than it was before. It just needs a little bit of paint and then it will be ready to go back to work. I’m surprised it didn’t warp and tweak the plate, but that’s nice. This is not my best work, but also not my worst work. I haven’t done any stick welding since I did my trailer in 2019, and I haven’t done much welding in the time since. For someone out of practice, I’m pretty happy with that. 

I’m going to get this painted up and then it can go back to work. I’m sure someone is wondering why I didn’t just replace the whole arm. I’m not sure how much that would cost or if it’s even available from the dealer. But the replacement process would be quite a bit more involved than what I did. You would have to come through with an annular cutter, drill out the plug welds on either side, cut it free of the tube, take the plate off, put it back on, making sure everything is aligned, etc. So it’s doable, but it’s a lot more involved than what I wanted to do. 

Thank you as always for joining, I greatly appreciate it! If you have any questions or comments on the repair, anything in the shop or anything else, please feel free to leave me a comment. As always, I’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. And until next time, happy woodworking!