It’s my birthday today, and my awesome wife Diana bought me some awesome presents.
First off was the Cigweld Weldskill 170. That’s the one I knew about. It was already awesome!
What I wasn’t expecting is the iPod
Touch I was presented with when I woke up this morning! OMFGZ I wasn’t expecting that!
So here I am, writing a blog post on the touch, just to test it out!
Yeah!
I love you sweetie! You blow my mind every birthday!
Xoxox
It’s always best to be prepared for things such as fire especially when you ar doing things with welders and grinders like I have been lately. When I noticed Aldi were selling Fire extinguishers, and fire blankets for cheap, I decided to pick myself up some.
$15 for a 1kg extinguisher, and $5 for Fire blankets, How could I refuse!
The Fire Extinguisher is for my welding cart, and one fire blanket is for the kitchen, and the others for my shed / Welding cart.
I could have shown a step by step process of mounting the extinguisher, but it was so easy, there isn’t much point.
After Choosing where on the cart I wanted the extinguisher, I got out the drill, and with 2 self drilling metal screws through the slots in the mounting bracket, the extinguisher is mounted. The process was so simple and short, I didn’t document it.
Here is the cart, with the fire extinguisher mounted! Too easy!
So there we go, now I’m ready if I set anything on fire!
Or Oh No!. its the end of the week and I have nothing ready to post this week!
Well, first off, the last few weeks have been busy, with a trip to Hamilton Island with my wonderful new wife Diana for our honey moon, and then a trip to Wollongong the next weekend for my cousin’s 21st birthday, I haven’t done a whole lot
Our honeymoon coincided with our 3rd anniversary of seeing each other, so it served a double purpose.
For our anniversary, Diana was kind enough to buy me an awesome Ryobi 125mm angle grinder. Its great to have a good quality grinder, as the cheap ones seem to vibrate a bit more, and the switches of the ones I have are a bit poor, and so they are hard to turn on, and off.
My new angle grinder, Thank you sweetie
I bought a lovely pair of butterfly shaped earings
Also, as there wasn’t much point flying such a large present halfway across the country, we bought each other a small gift. seeming Diana has just started studying again, I found here a cool Hello Kitty pencil case, and filled it with pens. Diana found me a cool solar powered robot kit, which reminds me, I need to build it. unfortunately, I don’t have pictures of the pencil case, or the robot.
So what else have I been up to, apart from all this jet setting? not too much really.
My nitro exhaust is coming together slowly. I haven’t had much of a chance to run the car lately. I really should give it a run. Its looking like I’m going to go down the alloy path with the pipe, I have a nice thick plate for the mount. All I need to do now is everything else…. get a piece of suitably sized alloy pipe, work out how to bend it nicely, and in what shape I need it bent, and then get the two pieces brazed together
I’ve been trying to practice my welding here and there, whenever I have a chance. I currently need to source some more practice steel, as running stringers on plate gets old pretty quick
Sure, all the practice helps, but what I really want to do is join steel
You may have seen the vice stand I made a while back, well its getting a makeover. I was never really happy with it, it was too light, and unstable, and had a tendency to rock. I have an old steel car rim kicking around the house, so my plan is to cut off the feet, and make it a bit shorter, then attach the pipe to the wheel rim, and maybe, depending on how it goes with its initial weight, I’ll add some concrete
the old cross legs weren't that stable. I'm hoping by welding it to the car rim, it will be a lot more stable
Welding bench
well, my handy little welding bench is very handy, and I want to make it better. Recently at aldi’s there was a sale on fire extinguishers and fire blankets. I’m planning on adding both to the trolley, as I think it’s a really good idea, with all that molten metal flying around.
I’m also looking to improve the surface. currently the underlying surface is wood with a metal sheet on top. I was thinking of pouring a concrete top in it instead of the wood, but I’m told that its not the greatest idea to get the concrete too hot, as it can crack or explode, So I’m not too sure. Maybe one solution is a fire brick lining, or maybe a single solid plate across the whole surface? I’m not sure yet.
That’s about it for now. Sorry for the non post today. I’ll try to have something with more substance for next time.
The way I look at things, if you want to do something like learn to weld, there are a couple of ways you can do it.
1. Get a welder, and start welding – You might have some success, you might get frustrated and stop. You might get OK at welding on flat pieces You won’t have much of an idea on what you are doing wrong, and how to fix it
2. Get a welder, get a book, and start welding, and reading when you have a spare moments. This is the way I’m doing it so far. My book is actually more than one book. Its the whole internet. One the internet, there are many forums, and many websites, some helpful, some less than helpful. If you look hard enough, you can find books and PDFs with valuable information in them that can help you
3. Get a welder, get a book, and get an education. This is probably the best way to do it, and really the only way in this day and age if you want to earn a living from it. You’ll have someone to give you feedback, to tell you what you are doing right / wrong. You’ll have access to equipment that you couldn’t get to use otherwise. You’ll learn much more, and experience much more than you could just at home.
For the time being, I’m taking the #2 option, of welding, and trying to read. Trying to take in what I can. I thought I would do this post to show others wanting to learn to weld were I’m finding my information. Some of the references I’ve found are posted below:
CIG’s The Manual Arc Welding Handbook. This is a pretty old book I belive, but seeming the process hasn’t changed much, if at all over the last 20 – 30 years (or longer) I figure its still a very handy book to have a look through.
The Miller Arc welding guide is a great reference which you can download from their website.
The Miller Arc welding guide is a handy reference. You can download it from their website HERE. It could also be worth taking a look at their website, especially if you are looking for info on TIG or MIG welding, as they have guides for those too.
The tutorials at www.mig-welding.co.uk are a fantastic place to start with your learning. There is an stick/arc tutorial as well as a MIG tutorial. I’ve seen them linked to quite a bit on the net when people are asking how to weld. They also have a great forum which is definitely worth a look.
The Welding Web forum is also a great source of information. It is an american welding forum, populated by a lot of very experienced welders from all over the world. If you ask well thought out questions, and can post welder settings etc… and photos, they seem to be fairly happy to offer feedback. I’m yet to post my practice welding on it, but at some point I think I probably will, to get some feedback on how I’m going. I think at the moment I’m still learning from my own critical review process.
So, that’s a start. There are other references out there, there are books and videos out there that could be informative, you just need to do a bit of research. I’m a bit short for time this week due to our honeymoon, uni work, regular work, and another trip, so I couldn’t add more of what I have, but I’ll try to tell you all about more info when i can find it.
My little portable welding bench is pretty handy, but the biggest problem with it is that it’s TOO easy to move. It is pretty unsteady when working at the caster end. It has a little spike that you can push down into the ground to hold it stable, but as it wasn’t designed as a work bench, it doesn’t do the greatest job, especially if you are doing something like using a hack saw on some metal in the vice.
This is one of the old wheels removed from the cart.
To combat the issue, I was thinking of putting some locking caster wheels on it instead of the non-locking casters on it originally. This is a good idea, keeping it easily portable, but allowing some movement still.
Then, I thought, what if it just had feet, and not caster wheels at all? It would reduce the mobility slightly. I’d have to pick up the end to wheel it about like a wheel barrow. I figured that wouldn’t be too much of a loss, and it might prove to be even more stable than having even locking casters on the front. Plus, it wouldn’t cost me anything!
I had some 25mm square section, and i figured I could use that to make legs to go where the casters originally were. After thinking, I thought it would be hard to get a good weld on the trolly and the new legs, as both are rather thin, so I came up with this:
The new feet are made from a nut, a bolt, a piece of 25mm square section, and a short lenght of round section steel.
The nuts are much easier to weld onto the round tube. The square section pieces I’ve welded to the legs makes it easy to slide the legs into place, and then weld them on. I could have probably welded the round legs straight into the trolly, but it is made of even thinner metal then the smaller pieces I used.
One new foot welded onto the cart.
The legs slide into postion, and get welded in. I was hoping to do better welds, but they will hold in this situation. Its so hard to get good welds on such light steel with this setup, and my skills.
It doesn't look too different, but its a lot more stabe now!
So, there we have it. The only addition I think is useful on the feet now is a lock nut on each foot, so they don’t move and get lopsided, but thats easy to do if I decide its needed.
So, I’ve been on a bit of a learning to weld mission lately. Over the years, I’ve done a little welding, but never anything of any kind of quality, or quantity.
For the last couple of years, I have had an old, beaten up arc welder which was given to me by my father. It was a handy little unit, but only having minimal adjustment of the amperage was a bit limiting to my learning. Fairly quickly, it became aparent that if I wanted to learn more about welding, I was going to need something with aperage adjustment. The old welder is a Cigweld Compact 2. The minimal controls consist of a switch that selects between 2.5 and 3.2mm Welding Electrodes. It seemed to work ok, and give reasonable results doing practice welds on thick plate, but I find I wanted a bit more control, especially when I’m welding on thinner metal and tube.
More after the jump:
DIY DATA 
