Stuff you have made today

[zx9]

Chemical anchor is a far better solution as they are brilliant at spreading the load from the fixing into the substrate and you have lots of choice as to what you use for a fixing.
Also there are loads of options between quickest setting and strongest bond.
There is no point in using a pure epoxy like Hilti RE500 (at £40 odd a tube) if you are wanting to fix a picture into a block wall.

Must be over fifteen years ago and I expect things have moved on but we used to use fischer (?) chemical anchors, the resin was in a glass tube. You drilled the hole, blew out the remaining dust, inserted a glass vial then hammered in a stainless steel stud which broke the glass vial, come back in a hour or so and fix to the stud we used them to fix 64" plasma screens to block work in the days when a plasma screen weighed about a kilo per diagonal inch.
They were great, very little mess, no mixing and no unused resin to go off before the next job.

 

[Munkul]

Slightly better than thunder bolts IMO are Reisser screws

REI52CF CONCRETE FRAME SCREWS

Love these things, very positive and strong fitting.

 

[The_Yellow_Ardvark]

Must be over fifteen years ago and I expect things have moved on but we used to use fischer (?) chemical anchors, the resin was in a glass tube. You drilled the hole, blew out the remaining dust, inserted a glass vial then hammered in a stainless steel stud which broke the glass vial, come back in a hour or so and fix to the stud we used them to fix 64" plasma screens to block work in the days when a plasma screen weighed about a kilo per diagonal inch.
They were great, very little mess, no mixing and no unused resin to go off before the next job.

I know the ones you mean.

Very good.

The ones we use, from out CCTV supplier are a stud, in a glass tube. You drill the hole, blow out. @barking mat We uses a 6mm plastic tube. Insert the stud and vile. Tap down, go for a coffee, in an hour good to go.
The issue I find is the 16mm bit eats our company batteries on the drills.

 

[jimbo84]

Needed a bit more shelf space in the garage, had some 40x5mm flat and some scaff boards going spare. A rough sand and varnish of the boards and resinned studs into the wall apart from the bottom two as the resin ran out so just some screws in the bottom fixings.

 

[Al Strachan]

SWMBO's been nagging me for weeks to paint an old garden table. Again, no before pics, but imagine a cheap looking powder coatet white and big flaking rust spots. She wanted it cream or white again.

Set about the thing on Sunday with the blowtorch, wire brush and scotch pad. The thing looked pretty good with a mix of rust, bluing from the torch, shiny bits etc. Had an old tin of 1k lacquer in the shed that would have ended up in the skip in a couple of years, so threw that on instead.

Maybe not to everyones taste, but 10 points earned with SWMBO!

 

[cianh91]

id have that in the house its a really nice design (think it wouldnt look anywhere near as good in white or cream)

 

[Lewis_RX8]

View attachment 231184

Lovley "Patina" , Think that's what that word means anyway.

Found that on one of my old hammer a bit of lacquer of oil for tools really brings it up.

 

[RichardM]

but 10 points earned with SWMBO!

She's the one who matters looks good to me too

 

[Munkul]

last night I "made" my press brake fold stuff evenly!
I've been at it a few times and probably made things worse rather than better, so last night brother and I set to, and took all the tooling off, and all the tool holders.

1. checked table flatness with weights and 0.8mm welding wire. Has a 10 thou or so bow upwards in the middle - that's fine, it's a centre ram press, to be expected.
2. check parallelism with the top face - within a few thou. Spot on!
3. clean up wedge tool holders with wire brush, rags and WD40.
4. Refit end holders, clock them to 1 thou.
5. refit each holder left to right, clocking each one off the reference one on the right to a few thou each, accounting for the bow upwards in the middle.
6. refit top punch tool in centre, and bottom die tool to suit. Centre using the press with very low force - maybe 1 ton or so.
7. check flatness. Die tools are on their last legs, needed packing quite a bit at one end. check a few more times doing test folds.
8. finally do a little job for a customer - 4 sides folded up into a shallow tray. RIGHT FIRST TIME

I went home with a grin on my face - because up til now, everything was a struggle!

 

[nickk]

Following on from the replacement spiral staircase,thought I’d show the monstrosity it replaces,scrolls to fill spaces,weld to fill gaps,how can someone build such junk and walk away?

 

[Munkul]

Some good weight of scrap metal in there...

 

[Mark 2]

Good lord that's awful.

 

[nickk]

Some good weight of scrap metal in there...

I’ll keep the post,be alright for a gate,bit unusual as it’s 5” .

 

[Feet 'n Inches]

Good lord that's awful.

Couldn't agree more. Some of Messrs. Bodgit & Scarper's finest.

 

[Mick Annick]

I’ve got the Fischer kit with the cleaning rods, blowgun and nice heavy duty applicator gun.

The Fischer gear comes in different price levels. The top end stuff, £15-20 a tube is even stronger.

I used Fischer resin to secure all the uprights on the handrail for the stairs, excellent stuff, though hard work with a cheap mastic gun - I ruined two; will buy a proper one next time I’m out.

 

[Brad93]

I used Fischer resin to secure all the uprights on the handrail for the stairs, excellent stuff, though hard work with a cheap mastic gun - I ruined two; will buy a proper one next time I’m out.

The Fischer one is far superior to any others I’ve used.

 

[slim_boy_fat]

last night I "made" my press brake fold stuff evenly!

Did you talk sharply to it?

 

[Dr.Al]

Today I finished making a router table.

A few months ago I got a load of t-slot extrusion out of the skip at work. I've used some of this for my welding arm support and my bandsaw vertical table. This router table used up almost all of what I had left.

It's almost entirely made of t-slot extrusion, apart from a few bits of milled aluminium, four home-made thick steel washers and a bit of MDF (and a router table insert that I bought from Axminster). It mounts onto the bench (with two long M6 screws) rather than having feet like a normal router table. That means that it has a flat profile so it stores nicely.

It has two options for fences. Firstly, there's the fence that came with my 1/2" router, which has a millimetre "calibrated" dial for adjustment:

For more flexibility (but without the fine adjust), I can also slide the t-slot extrusion along and will probably use this to mount something tall for routing boards that are upright:

This is what it looks like under the MDF panel:

The bits of aluminium you can see are 12 mm thick and are there to bring the 18 mm MDF up to the same height as the top of the 30 mm extrusion.

The whole frame sitting on the bench:

The steel "washers" mounted to the bottom arms make up the difference between the two bits of 30 mm extrusion and my 53-ish mm thick bench.

I had to drill an extra hole in the router plate from Axminster (down and left from the central hole in the photo below) - that allows the long screw that came with my router to go in and adjust the cutter height from the top of the router table without having to scrabble below the table. The screw has a Phillips (in fact more likely JIS) head screw, so I might remake that with a hex socket at some point. Being a Japanese router it is at least a civilised metric thread (M6).

Another view of how it mounts to the bench:

The MDF panel is held in purely by the weight of the router (and the relatively tight fit in the extrusion), but I really can't see it going anywhere. It is, however, easy to get out so you can fit the router with the MDF loose:

and then drop it back into place when it's set up.

One big advantage of not having feet on the router table is that there's easy access to all sides of the router while it's in situ:

Note to self: must clean that sticky stuff off the front of the extrusion in that photo - I thought I'd got rid of all that blasted stuff! The perils of building stuff from skip-fodder!

I'd envisaged that it might need a support leg down to the ground to stop it sagging under the weight, but I can't see any movement when I drop the router and MDF panel into the frame, so I think it's fine. It would be easy to add this later anyway.

This was very much a make-it-up-as-you-go-along and involved lots of changes of plans (for example the reason I started thinking about bench mounting rather than having feet was that I didn't have enough t-slot extrusion left to make the feet!) Despite the haphazard design approach, I'm really pleased with the end result!

 

[bricol]

That chemical resin is amazing.

I had some left over which needed using up, and glued two off cuts of concrete fence post together, I've tried sledge hammering it to no avail, as a destructive testing experiment.

Don't forget to blow out the holes with a compressor first.

No compressor to hand? Child's drink straw, close your eyes...

Just remember to either take the deep breath before you insert the straw in the hole, or before you apply your lips to the straw after inserting it in the hole . . . otherwise while the subsequent vacuum extraction of dust from the hole is quite efficient . . .

 

[Munkul]

Did you talk sharply to it?

I talk to all my gear, usually at either extreme, e.g.

"mmm, my gear is mint, love having gear"

or

"arrgghh, stupid piece of junk, useless scrap metal, what can I upgrade you to?"