Nicely done David! Curious on the swing out, how did you weld the two pieces together? Is there a sleeve inside the square tubings or did you simply butt welded them together?
Thanks Ali. I just butt welded them together, no sleeve or anything. I beveled both sides of the joint about 30 degrees to allow for good penetration. I did two passes, and made sure to get good penetration on my root pass. That's how I do most of my welds in thicker material that I want to be strong. Not sure if that's the right way or not since I mostly attended YouTube University of Welding, but I didn't lose the jerry cans last week in Utah so it must at least be adequate, haha.
Here is a pic of my root pass. It's maybe 1/2 or 5/8 of the tube wall thickness. The second picture is with the cover pass on top. I could have done a thicker root pass, maybe even just did one full thickness pass, but it's just easier to do two in my opinion, and you can focus more on getting 100% penetration on the root if you're not worrying about getting full thickness at the same time. This is all TIG if that wasn't apparent, I still haven't gotten a MIG welder yet, though the time is fast approaching.
You can kind of see how I beveled the mating surfaces in this picture:
I think if you have good welds with full penetration you shouldn't have to sleeve it to make the welded area pretty much as strong as anywhere else. Obviously this depends on base material strength, filler material or welder wire used, quality of weld etc., but when using relatively low carbon low strength steel like this I think it's a reasonable assumption. And if it's not, that's what the safety factor is for

. In this case it also wasn't super feasible to sleeve it because there's a 12 degree bend in the swingout arm to match the contour of the bumper.