Stuff you have made today

[Turbo]

Some stick welds, 70 amps 2.5mm rod, 3 and 4mm thickness on the square tubing. I think this is th ebest stick welding joint I have made so far. I started out at 100 amps but that was too high, blew holes in the thinner wall tube when I tried doing an up hill pass, kept adjusting dowwards, maybe could have gone to 75A. They turned out nice though, and the welding machine is really nice to stick weld with, I can jam the electrode in real good and it won't give a damn, real hard to make the arc go out.

This I welded earlier at 100 amps, two passes, one root pass, just a straight stringer then a sort of weave.

I've done so little welding lately it feels like starting from zero again but towards the end it was going real well and I felt my skills improve.

Looks good!

Recently I have been using MMA for most things. I could have used mig for them but MMA just felt a lot better. A mig weld can hide a lot of problems but a MMA weld takes no prisoners, if it looks bad is usually is bad & a decent MMA weld gives more satisfaction.

 

[cardiffrob]

Fitted. Not far off going into 'production'. I have 3 sets to make and then send off for the fabric (Mohair) and plastic window stuff. Any suggestions for making it a bit rustproof? They have a nasty habit of rotting out.

 

[brightspark]

get them galvanised

 

[Migmac]

Made the wife happy Got her tumble drier working, needs a new belt and felt bearing. Another job for the new year

 

[The_Yellow_Ardvark]

I made 3 Mini Humans happy.
I help build them Lego sets.

 

[Dieselman 63]

Made the wife happy Got her tumble drier working, needs a new belt and felt bearing. Another job for the new year

I replaced the belt on the CD player for the stereo, it just perished the other week, stereo is from 1994, massive old Marantz thing.

It’s not the first time I’ve fixed the stereo. We thought the amp was broken internally due to firing up but no sound, so I opened it up. The volume control socket had become dislodged, so snapped back in and off it went

 

[cardiffrob]

get them galvanised

I assumed there would be a minimum charge for Galv? Also, making them in stainless is another option since they'll be covered. Is stainless harder to bend?

Alos, I wondered if there was a better way of bending that steel. I'm doing it in a vice with a rubber mallet and then trying it every inch or so to see if the curve is right. Is there a smarter way?

 

[captain-destructo]

Fitted. Not far off going into 'production'. I have 3 sets to make and then send off for the fabric (Mohair) and plastic window stuff. Any suggestions for making it a bit rustproof? They have a nasty habit of rotting out.View attachment 163505
View attachment 163502

brain has gone blank!
copper plated?
whats that electricary thing where you put it in a tank of some sort of liquid and scrap copper and pass power through it ???

 

[brightspark]

copper sulphate electrolysis

 

[merryman]

Don't even think about galve. The galvanisers are quite capable of bending heavy gauge steel park benches. Zinc plate would be better than copper, there is a minimum price for low quantities, used to be £40 but that was a few years back. Frost used to sell a diy kit, may still do, but pre-prep is a faf. Stainless is much harder to work than steel. Pre-war and quality cars would use a soft grade of brass for that sort of job.

 

[Paul.]

Hot zinc spray would be ideal for those, in the past I've used it quite a bit on similar items,
Its zinc sprayed through a flame, very quick and although its hot does not distort the metal, I've seen a complete chassis treated with it,

 

[Farside]

I finally got around to making a 19" rack unit for the voice processing side of the rajo hobby.
The upper part contains three Behringer strips and the lower part houses some dials and a tuner, plus the Green Meanie.
I spray-glued some aluminium foil on the inside to attempt a shielding effect for the audio processing side of things.
So far, it's working quite well. Gone are the annoying intermittent RFI noises, caused by a hodge-podge of power cables, antenna leads and audio cabling all criss-crossing and generally making a mare's nest of the thing.
I also learned something about proper gain-staging on the audio strips, too. Amazing the difference that makes.

 

[Jim Davey]

Didn’t make this myself exactly, and sadly nor did I weld it apart from an odd tack weld here or there during fit up. But I did run the job, source the coded welders, equipment and consumables and was on site from 6:00am-9:00pm for three days in a row to get the job done by the Saturday deadline.

Job was to weld 18x 900 lbs flanges to 9x 11.4metre 8” schedule 160 pipes, to be used as a rig by local cable manufacturing firm to enable them to measure the exact extent of water ingress to damaged sub-sea cables.

I got called in as the flanges they had put on initially were unsuitable and they had a few leaks. The task was to cut the old flanges off, prepare a nice square bevel on all 18 ends and get the new 900 series flanges welded on as quick as possible to be ready for an important client visit to witness the cable test after Christmas. It quickly became clear that due to the pressures involved it would not be a case of simply renting the customer the equipment and letting them get on with it. They would need some help from a specialist with pipe welding experience and the codings and procedures to cover such an undertaking.
Normally I’d just put the two companies together for a small percentage but due to the timings, the critical nature of getting it done on time and the fact that opening up a new account for a company this big takes longer than we actually had to do the job meant I opted to take the job on myself.

Here is the pile of flanges removed ready to start the bevelling process.
Now the kit required for this job is specialised and very expensive so as much as I’d love to have it on my fleet it’s not a tool I can justify so TAG PIPE came to our rescue with a reasonable rate on a prep 8 110v bevelling machine.
What a superb bit of kit, ok it should be at nearly £7,000 but, wow! Beautiful, clean, square preps with ease that made fit up so much easier.

The machine has an expanding mandrel that locates inside the pipe end squarely aligning the head of the machine to the axis of the pipe and locking the tool in place. Then once you start the tool you turn the handle slowly and that drives the rotating cutters gradually into the end of the pipe. A pair of cutters opposite each other do the bevelling and one square edged cutter does the face or land cut. I wish I took more time to photo/film the various stages but there was a lot of pressure to get things done so that sort of thing took a back seat.

Just lifting the flanges into place was a chore but the garage at home had the answer in the form of an engine crane.

We used a pipe alignment clamp and 2.4mm Tig rod to set our gap. (Sorry no pics) and then Tig welded the root and hot pass.

Unfortunately, at the beginning of the job I was struggling to find a coded flux core mig welder available (hardly surprising a week before Christmas) so we had to start fill out with low-hydrogen arc rods.
The guy doing it was a very skilled man but it became very clear after the first day that we would not meet our deadline unless we either threw more men at it or were able to swap to a faster process. To that end I kept on searching for a coded FCAW operator and I found one pretty much on my doorstep. With that hurdle over it was just grinding to get the work out with me flitting about sorting rods, wire, gas, prepping pipe ends and flanges with a die grinder, setting up the purge gear and being on hand to sort out power distribution and extra extension leads and kit as needed for the extra man, and pre-heating flanges/pipe butts as needed.
Another really useful bit of kit we outsourced were a two pairs of powered turning rolls rated at 5 tonne a pair. (The pipes we were welding weighed approximately 1.5 tonnes)
These allowed us to place the pipe on the rollers and weld them all down hand without having to stop and manually turn the pipe at regular intervals. These came from Red-D-Arc and after a bit of a false start when the am delivery of the second unit turned into 4pm then some set up time the machines proved invaluable. Again, I seem to have neglected to take a picture of the rollers but you can see it doing it’s thing in the next couple of videos.

 

[Jim Davey]

Putting the Mig welder and the powered rollers to good use.

Quick video of the preheat, in actual fact it took 10-15 mins to get to the required preheat of 100 degrees with the air/propane mixer torch we had available.

As soon as each pipe was done it was painted and whisked away to be bolted together in a long line in the test area.

Once assembled it was capped off at each end then filled with water as much as possible then gas from a nitrogen bank was used to pressurise the remaining space to bring the total pressure to 120 bar. There were a couple of small leaks on the flange joints (loose bolts) but once re-torqued the rig held the desired pressure for the time it was meant to.

After that it was home for a new pair of pants and a well earned pint or three.

 

[decca]

Great to see that. Thanks for posting Jim.

 

[WorkshopChris]

Excellent bit of work Jim. Nice to see some industrial kit in action.

 

[The_Yellow_Ardvark]

Bit of fun with a resin stone affect casting kit.


Cleo's head, was latex moulded from a "Tourist trap item". The Black stone dust and 2 pack resin is mixed and poured in.
Tip. make sure your have the correct silicon for the mould. The one we used shows signs oh heat damaged.


Mug for scale.





Side view, the base is again resin, but with cement dust.
The white base is a bit of pallet wood bleached and then subjected to UV light from a welder. It adds a darker tint to the winter growth ring. Yes I left a moulding box in place to show how simple the moulds are.

 

[Bear]

Well finally got my welder back and made some progress on my new metal working / welding bench this afternoon.

View attachment 155798

Mandatory mug for scale. It just at the perfect height for me so im not constanly arched over or bending

Following on from this post i finally got my bench finished off. It will be a great everyday bench and is at perfect working height for me



Its probably eventually going to be nowhere near wide enough but its perfect for now

 

[Ashley Burton]

Following on from this post i finally got my bench finished off. It will be a great everyday bench and is at perfect working height for me

View attachment 163759 View attachment 163760

What thickness is that plate?

 

[Bear]

What thickness is that plate?

Its 8mm