I'm going to be welding up my tie rod and drag link this weekend and have never welded a bung into tube. Any tips for how to do it well?

I like to drill some holes in the tubing to plug weld the insert first. Adds a little strength but primarily keeps the insert square in the tube so you can weld around it. Also, I'm sure you already know, grind a nice taper on the end of tube before you install the bung. That way you aren't contaminating the weld with the melted tubing on the corner and your weld will lay in joint more uniformly. Lastly, TIG it!

including the hole mentioned by crawlercreations, I insert a bolt (3/4" fine or whatever shank size you have). just helps from burs or deforming. I let it cool down a bit before removing. Just my $.02

Since I just had this done yesterday, I can tell you what they did for mine. He got everything squared up on his table then he did it 1/4 of the way around at a time. He didn't drill any holes but he did bevel the edges of the tube. I didn't have any issues putting the tie rod in afterwards.

Now I just got to get it all on the truck!

Hurry up and get this figured out and you can weld my radius arms. I would prefer to have them tig'd

Going to be a long, long time till I feel good about TIGing something structural.

Thanks for the tips! Got them welded up. They're not super pretty, but they should be good to go. There were no problems with warping the threads, to the point that I'm actually a little worried that I didn't get enough heat into them. I welded them 1/4 at a time and was careful to let them cool between welds, so I think that's what made the difference. I think most of the threads on these are also outside the area that was welded. As usual, I'm probably overthinking this....

should I plug weld the insert? I dont want to kill the threads as the insert is this. 1/4" wall tube how big of a hole for a plug weld?

I would do 2-4 plug welds. 1/4ish hole is good. Might go a little bigger for the 2" tube. I welded the plugs, then welded the perimeter in 4 sections allowing things to cool to almost room temp between each weld and wound up with no thread distortion. It took forever, but the results were worth it.

thats what I was thinking.