belt grinder build continues

Starting over...

The tubes that I welded up around the bar last weekend were both too small/warped so that the bar could not be inserted and removed as was required.  So, I bought some more 3/8" cold rolled stock and more 1.5" square cold rolled, and tried again.  I ordered the 1.5" square bar from onlinemetals.com but I bought the 3/8" cold rolled material from Foltz in Hagerstown, MD.  Onlinemetals got the bar to me with a week!   

I did manage to weld up a fixture to help me use the hydraulic jack to press the old 1.5" sq bar out, so I figured I just wasted the money for the 2nd 2ft section of bar.  However, looking back over the plans I came to realize that 2ft equals 24", but I needed a 14" length of bar AND an 18" section!  So, I needed to buy the extra bar anyway!  

The 16" tube

The 14" tube

Both tubes.  The welds aren't pretty, but after warping the first 2 tube attempts, I was paranoid about getting these too hot!  I jumped the welds around with no more than 1" welded at a time in any location!

The 1.5" square bar moves freely in-and-out of both of these.  I used 0.012" of shim instead of the 0.008" I tried the first time.  However, with the extra care that I took with the welding this time I am not sure that I needed to.

This is the first attempt - after I finally managed to get the bar out of the tube it was stuck in!  The bar that I removed was galled pretty rough in a couple places, but after grinding and sanding it  smooth again, I think it is still useable.

Feet installed!

I was considering chopping up one of the failed tubes for making the risers for the feet, but I had already cut and shaped the steel I needed to build risers last weekend, so I just went ahead and used those.  I think they turned out nicely.  I tried to keep them nice looking by doing the welds on the inside of the riser!

I also drilled and tapped the holes on the sides of the tubes.

Setting up the hinges and welding...

I used some oak scrap wood that I had laying around and milled it to the correct dimensions to give me the space I needed between the components.  This worked pretty well,  but of course I still had to clamp the pieces in place since the wood had some spring to it!

One flaw in the build-plans that I am following: Using a .5" rod in .5" holes for alignment purposes makes sense - BUT - getting that rod out of those holes can be damn near impossible!  If ANY galling occurs in the 8 3/8" holes that the rod has to be removed from, you WILL have problems!  

I did end up having to break the tack welds on the end here to get the rod out.  Then I had to go back and carefully align a .5" bolt through there and weld it up again.  Fortunately, it worked and it seems to be good.

Below is a video that shows the working hinge.

The video just did not want to focus - sorry for the quality!

Belt-grinder related injury!

I thought I would through this in...  as I was removing the rod from the hinge components, I managed to hit my thumb pretty hard with a hammer!  OUCH!  I actually split the skin on the thumb and it was a bugger to get it to stop bleeding.  I survived though.  

Just putting this here for myself really, as a warning or reminder to cool off and walk away when things go sideways.  Best to gather yourself and approach things rationally rather than let the brute loose and damage yourself and/or others!

Welding table done and starting the belt-grinder build

Welding table

Just a lot of cutting, drilling and welding!  Oh, and grinding.  I moved the welder up to the garage where I had room to work (since the tractor and UTV are out getting serviced).  The welds I was doing here were on 1/8" or less thicknesses of metal, so the 110V power cord worked ok.

Welded the two side "rails" on to support the rod used as a hinge and guide for the other tubes.

This is a .5" rod that goes through all of the tubes/rails to act as a hinge and alignment point.

I welded a washer on as a stop 

Now just need to cut these off to about where I am pointing in the picture.  I want some overhang, but not that much.

A bit hard to tell from this picture, but the height adjustment corners are welded into place (and the table is shorter - I cut the top of the previous angle brackets at the corners).  This is taller than my workbench, but way less than before.

Moving the table into the shop!

OK - table is essentially done - moving it to the shop.. oh my.

This is where the table is to go... I want it near the incoming power.

Actually, it cleaned up quick but it was a bugger to move from the garage to the shop (there was 4" snow on the ground and its kinda heavy by hand - no tractor!).

Tada!  In its home!  I even have a chair - it's important to be comfy when welding

Moved the welder back in to the shop.

That wall needs to be cleaned up though - depressing looking at that thing!

Welding table in action!  I need to get the welder and tank off the table.  Time to make (or buy) another welding cart?  Maybe just a shelf...

Belt-grinder build starts!

First thing was to cut and shape the steel parts.  I just used the plans themselves.  Printed them out at 1:1 scale, cut the parts out in paper and then use spray glue to paste them on the metal.  Then I cut, shape, drill, etc... until the parts look like the templates.

I have been using the belt-sander with coarse grit (80) to do most of the grinding.  With large amounts of steel to remove I will use the metal cutting bandsaw first.  Its slow, but faster than just grinding and doesnt get as hot.

When I drill the holes I use a lubricant (WD-40) which tends to dissolve the glue - then the paper falls off!  So I have had to re-print and re-glue the templates in many cases.   

To make the channels for the belt-grinder frame and tables I decided to move to full MIG welding.  I had to set up my welder with solid MIG wire, which I bought locally (Yay!  my local hardware store is improving).  I also bought some grinder wheels for my angle grinder (again, yay, local store!).  I went home to install the new wire, then I realized that I didn't have the right welding/wire tip!  I thought I had bought a pack that came with multiple sizes, but that pack only provided tips for the welding gun with the wire feeder at the hand.  So, I went back to the store and YAY!  they had the tips I needed!  Very happy about that!  So I set the MIG gas up and move the welder over to the 220V line and try a quick test weld on some scrap.  Beautiful!  It is so easy - much cleaner than flux core too!  Whew. 

So, I shimmed up the channel box with about .008" of aluminum soda can walls.   I clamped to the table and tack-welded the small box up in short order.  Then I forced the bar out and all seemed well.  But the real test comes when you do the final welds - will the box warp so much that the bar won't slide in easy?  I went ahead and got the long box ready and then I went to tack weld .... ACK!  Something went wrong - the wled sputtered and popped - just ugly!  

This just looks like picture of what happens when you don't use any shield gas - but I had not changed the setup between this and the previous weld that worked perfectly!  I checked the gas, gas pressure, flow-rate - it was fine!  WTF?

I did some deeper investigation and discovered that when I switched out the wire I had forgot to tighten one of the wire feeder thumbscrews.  It was the one that held the gas channel into the cable/hose to the gun!  UGH.  The fact that I had just used the same setup to do the short tube and that it worked nicely is a mystery.  All that I can think of is that I must have jostled the hose loose and disconnected the gas line between those two welds. 

In any case, this got me somewhat upset and I think lead to the next problem - weld overheating and warping!  I removed the bar from the long box, again, no problems really yet - except bad tack welds.  I decided to try to weld over the bad - porous - welds.  Not a good idea!  It just gets worse.  SO i ended up grinding ot the bad porous welds and trying again.  I was able to correct some of the porous welds but not all.  Also, I think because I was too focused on fixing the porosity issue, I wasn't paying enough attention to letting the welds cool and moving around to let the heating occur uniformly.  Bottom line is that I finished the welds and headed in  for the night.  I was obsessed with it though, so I got up around 4am the next day and went out to check to see if I had warped the boxes too bad.   

Yep!  I did.  I got the bar into both boxes and then they were stuck!  ARGGGH (yes, both boxes! stop laughing! :P)

The first box, the short one, is on the left - looks fine - the 2nd box is one the right - UGH!  

After grinding out some of the porosity

Just couldn't grind enough of the bad weld out to get rid of this porosity.

Most of the welds were saveable - but, by then I had forgot about being careful about overheating any particular area!

I was able to use a hydraulic jack to push out the bar from the large box, and most of the short box, but I noticed that there was some significant galling on the bar at that point.  Damn.  One workaround that I was thinking about was to simply get that bar out and mill off a few thousandths until it fit nicely again (I still might do that - I have to think about it).  I really didn't want this project to take a long time!  DANG.  Haste and impatience got me in trouble again!

So, just in case I find that I am unable to remove the bar from the small box I stopped on the way home and picked up some more steel to weld up two new boxes.  Unfortunately, Foltz (in Hagerstown) didn't have any 1.5" square bar.  I did find that Onlinemetals.com did have the 1.5" steel I needed, so I ordered another 2' section.  It should be here before next weekend (I hope).  

Here are some pics of the Foltz metal storage area.

The really nice thing about Foltz is that they are just off my path between my city and country homes, and when I buy metal here I don't have to pay shipping!  Shipping for metal is significant!

Welding stuff! Fixing things. Cold.

Nutcracker Progress

I continued to practice my welding skills on the nutcracker build.    I am, slowly, getting better I think.  I am still using .030" flux-core wire in my welder, so technically I am NOT doing MIG welding.  MIG requires a shield gas.

Handle/lever was added - its now functional!

Here I still need to chop off the tail and figure out an option for the clamp.

Video showing the nutcracker in operation!

Throttle control for the backhoe

It's still too cold to even consider starting the backhoe, but I figured that I could still try to fix the throttle control.  As you can see from the pictures below, the cable broke off from the control lever.

Well, long story short - the throttle cable evidently got some water inside of it and froze - I couldn't move that cable at all!  I considered forcing it, but I didn't want to risk breaking that cable anymore - it's too close to the point where I will need to replace the whole run  of cable if it gets any shorter!

Not much cable on this end to work with!

There is some cable length at the other end I could pull through - if  the cable wasn't frozen in place!

The next day, however...  it warmed up enough for me to pull a little bit of cable through - enough to get a hold of anyway!

I managed to straighten out the cable enough to get it through a hole that I drilled in the bolt shaft on the throttle lever.

The cable is secured in place on the throttle lever by two nuts I tightened against each other

I am still afraid to try it out because its cold and that throttle cable is brittle!  I am also thinking that I should put some loctite on those nuts to keep them from loosening from the vibrations.

Examining some of the scrap walnut

I had moved some of the scrap walnut from the floor and cleaned it up and temporarily restacked it on the sawmill bed.  I brushed it off good too.  I think there may be some good wood in some of this stuff! 

There is a fair amount of this walnut 

There will be some waste, of course, when milled into a usable condition

Here is a piece that I trimmed and put through the planer.  It actually looks quite nice!   Very nice wood to work with as compared to oak and maple!  I ended up giving this piece to friend at work who helped acquire and mill this wood.  He has considerably more carpentry skills than I do.

Post soaking continues

I have been trying to get one post a day through the copper naphthenate bath.  I like to let each post soak overnight.  I think that some of the ones I did when it was real cold out may not have absorbed as much preservative as they need.  I may put them back in for a while.

Six posts left to go!

I am not using as much treatment chemical as I would have thought.  The wood only absorbs so much.  I have used about 1 gallon of the CuNap concentrate so far.  I did mix mup another batch this weekend.

Welding table - ideation to early build in one day!

In preparing for the welding I will need to do for the belt-grinder build, I decided to just make a welding table.  I determined I needed one after looking at the damage my tablesaw table was taking from my nutcracker build!  

I found pretty much everything I needed right in one place - my garage!  Actually sitting next to each other!

Looking around for ideas and scrap to work with - I found this old packing frame from my woodmaxx woodchipper!

Old shelf support brackets (I think) from an old store

Just need to get it out...

After using metal cutting chopsaw to liberate these square steel tubes

Just need to correct the height and attach those tubes and its done!  Next weekend will see it done!

Belt grinder supplies are in!

I have everything (well most everything) I need to build the belt grinder!  Now the hard part...

That's about $200 in metal there!  Not to mention the shipping.  Ugh.

2 HP electric motor!  3-phase, sealed (TEFC)   Bugger is heavy.

Tractor and UTV off to be fixed and maintained

Now that it is snowy/cold/icky outside and I am not in dire need of my tractor and UTV, I decided to have them serviced.   Hines came out Friday and picked them up just before the rain started (as it started actually).   They got them both on the same truck.  They were packed in tight though.

We had to push this down to the truck bed from the garage - fortunately its all downhill!  They used a winch once it was this far.

The tractor was able to back right up onto the bed.

Off they go!