conor1n
Member
- Messages
- 556
- Location
- London/Ireland
Evening all,
I borrowed a blasting part of a friend a good while back nearly two years ago i'd say. The design was crap, which meant when I filled it with shot the front leg broke off, quite annoying. Anyway, I had been planning on repairing it but never got around to it until yesterday. I need it for doing some light blasting of a couple of small fixtures during my SL 500 underbody tidy up.
Anyway, initial pics..
Then I got to work.. Bit of a photo dump incoming. I need to say this up front. The welds look crap - but are more than sufficient - I hadn't welded anything in about 18months and I mention some key learnings about my machine towards the end.
I had some box iron in the corner, which was the perfect length. The blasting pot itself is quite light metal. Probably between 0.5 - 0.8mm .. That meant I didn't have much of a hope of getting the heavier box welded without burning through it.
So I cut out a small piece of steel which was a bit heavier and welded that on as a base for the box on.
Started off by prepping the surface with a brown scotch brite disc on a pistol grip air tool.
Worth noting for the eagle eyed of you - that steel is lightly galvanised and I did remove it before welding.
I crudely placed the patch piece into the vice and hammered it a bit to bend it to match up with radius on pot. Worked fine.
I did notice the original leg did fit into the box iron. For a brief second I contemplated trying to be too smart with this.. but quickly decided any fancy contraptions which would likely be a weak point.
Ready to weld...
I was really paranoid about burning holes in the pot and so decided I was going to make loads of tacks around the sheet and let it cool in between. As you can see below, I also didn't burn in to the pot enough, so these welds look kind of cold to me.
What I didn't realise until much later was that the Esab Rebel is actually quite smart supposedly - according to a review I watched ages ago. It monitors the weld and will adjust amps / volts etc as you weld. I had it turned right down the 0.8mm setting on Smart MIG and it turns out you can actually run a bead and it didn't burn through. In hindsight.. I could have made the welds much better looking. It's frustrating because people love to use the term "bird ****" when mocking other peoples welds.. and I know I could have done better.
I borrowed a blasting part of a friend a good while back nearly two years ago i'd say. The design was crap, which meant when I filled it with shot the front leg broke off, quite annoying. Anyway, I had been planning on repairing it but never got around to it until yesterday. I need it for doing some light blasting of a couple of small fixtures during my SL 500 underbody tidy up.
Anyway, initial pics..
Then I got to work.. Bit of a photo dump incoming. I need to say this up front. The welds look crap - but are more than sufficient - I hadn't welded anything in about 18months and I mention some key learnings about my machine towards the end.
I had some box iron in the corner, which was the perfect length. The blasting pot itself is quite light metal. Probably between 0.5 - 0.8mm .. That meant I didn't have much of a hope of getting the heavier box welded without burning through it.
So I cut out a small piece of steel which was a bit heavier and welded that on as a base for the box on.
Started off by prepping the surface with a brown scotch brite disc on a pistol grip air tool.
Worth noting for the eagle eyed of you - that steel is lightly galvanised and I did remove it before welding.
I crudely placed the patch piece into the vice and hammered it a bit to bend it to match up with radius on pot. Worked fine.
I did notice the original leg did fit into the box iron. For a brief second I contemplated trying to be too smart with this.. but quickly decided any fancy contraptions which would likely be a weak point.
Ready to weld...
I was really paranoid about burning holes in the pot and so decided I was going to make loads of tacks around the sheet and let it cool in between. As you can see below, I also didn't burn in to the pot enough, so these welds look kind of cold to me.
What I didn't realise until much later was that the Esab Rebel is actually quite smart supposedly - according to a review I watched ages ago. It monitors the weld and will adjust amps / volts etc as you weld. I had it turned right down the 0.8mm setting on Smart MIG and it turns out you can actually run a bead and it didn't burn through. In hindsight.. I could have made the welds much better looking. It's frustrating because people love to use the term "bird ****" when mocking other peoples welds.. and I know I could have done better.