Tip 5: Welding quality

I think I've mentioned before that welding is not my specialty. Apart from that, good welding equipment is very expensive. My cheap stick welding machine is good to spot weld parts together and then I let a qualified welder do the rest, but be careful! Even if you think the job has been done well, you have to make sure!
I always go for TIG-welding. It gives a clean result, is applicable on all sorts of metals and is by far the strongest connection you can get by welding. Like I explained in my "Tip 1", I had to change my steering housing from metal tubing to a decent housing made from a solid bar. The new housing needed to be welded on like the first one. Unfortunately, my regular mechanic was closed at that time, so I had to ask someone else to do the welding.
Probably due to a misunderstanding, the other guy used acetylene to weld the housing on to the forks.
Luckily I do a checkup of the bike before every ride, so this is what happened after a few rides:

This could have resulted in a serious accident if I hadn't noticed this in time! Of course, the repair was pretty straight forward and I was riding again a few days later...