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!

Family x-mas, and COLD weather continues!

Family x-mas

We got together on the 6th of January at Mom's house.  Unfortunately, Connie, my sister, was unable to attend.  She had come down with a bad cold and had to cancel at the last minute.  The rest of us got together and had sauerkraut and pork.   Lots of cookies too.  Too many cookies.  LOL.  Ah well, its tough time of year to be on a diet!  I was doing pretty good.  I was down to 245 just the day before the party.  That's 40 lbs down since October!

COLD

The weather is in it's 2nd week of  single digit temperatures.  The doors on the country house where actually sticking due to ice condensing between the doors and the frames!   We had a dog-grooming scheduled for Saturday morning, but they rescheduled for the 13th due to the cold weather.  I guess it was considered too dangerous for some of the pet-owners to get to the shop.   I have been doing work in the shop as much as possible to avoid the biting cold winds.

Welding practice and Nutcracker build

Last week I was just running beads and welding silly stuff together to practice my MIG skills.  That was ok, but it got boring, so I decided to see what I could find on Instructables for small welding projects.  Well, I stumbled on a nutcracker design that sparked an idea.   I designed my own, similar to the one that was presented but using my old square shelving tubing (of which I have a LOT).  I scrounged around a bit and found enough steel to give the build a try.  I am winging a lot of it.

Since the walls of the tubing is thin, I decided not to drill holes into it, which would further weaken it. 
Instead I welded the pins to the surface of the tubing.

I made tabs of steel and drilled holes through them and welded them to the sides of the tubing.  These tabs are thicker than the tubing walls and provide a better bearing surface.

My welds are improving.  Its still damn difficult to see the weld while its happening though.  My breath fogs the helmet!

Oh.  I got a new welding helmet too.  Its auto-darkening, and unlike the old one, it seems to work more reliability.

I have a concern that maybe I didn't leave enough room between the hammer and the anvil to fit a nut in!  

Here it is with the pusher rod attached and forward

And with the pusher rod pulled back.

I have 4 more tabs to cut and the main lever rod to put in place.  I tried to get it done Sunday, but it was too damned cold to be outside for long, so I decided to just wait.  It's just for welding proactive anyway.

Post wood-treatment continues

I was only able to get another 2 posts done since we weren't there very long this weekend.   I didn't even take the tractor over to get the remaining posts to saw to length.  I did pull them out of the stacks though,  They are ready to grab and saw when I get there this coming weekend.

Another post is in soaking.  At these temperatures I think it takes longer to soak in!  I let each post sit overnight when I first put them in.  Then at least 4-6 hours when I flip it over.  Sometimes overnight for the second side too.

Seven (7) posts done by the end of this weekend!

The variety of wood is quite apparent here!

The darker wood is red-oak.  I am not sure what the lighter wood is - maybe basswood or poplar.

I pulled these seven (7) posts out of the lumber stacks to get ready to trim them to length.  It was just too cold to go and trim them this weekend!

I still have two (2) posts already cut to length and ready to go yet anyway.  There is also one soaking in the trough.  So I have 17 posts.  I need at most 13 for the fence, and 2 for arbor post replacements.  I might replace other arbor posts though, since I am betting there are more that will rot off soon.