When I purchased my Lincoln Precision Tig 185 eight years ago (has it really been that long?) I knew I wanted to use it to complete lots of projects.
What I had in mind were projects related to trucks. It's turned out that the net can be cast much, much wider.
My parents are re-doing their fireplace mantle, and needed a piece of angle iron affixed above the fireplace for heat protection.
There was already a piece of steel embedded into the masonry, and this provided a starting point.
My torch lines and foot pedal cord are 25 feet long. That's long enough to reach many places, but not quite long enough in this case. The welding machine had to be brought right into the living room.
I used a strip of flat stock to bridge a gap, and then welded the angle iron to the flat strap.
For pure attachment purposes, intermittent welds would have been sufficient. However, since we wanted to block both heat and fumes from getting out of the fireplace, the best course of action was to weld all the way across the seam. It took a while, as the TIG process always does, but produced the desired result.
One thing you can't avoid with welding is heat distortion. You can minimize it, but you can't eliminate it.
As I welded, the long end of the angle iron progressively tweaked upward. The angle iron was fairly heavy-walled (1/4-inch, if memory serves) so it wasn't an easy task just to push it back into position.
The solution was to cut the angle iron, anchor the end to the wall with a lag bolt, and re-weld the seam I'd cut.