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Yeah - I'm sure that the deposit I paid was probably at or above the wholesale cost of the (used) tanks, though. I don't remember exactly how much it was, but it was above $100 and I think less than $200 for the two tanks, which are like three feet tall ish?
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Nov 11, 2010 20:19
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As far as tank carts go, for the larger sized cylinders, I really prefer chaining them to the wall, out of the way, and having a longer hose. Carts can tip over easily, and more often the not, there are a million obstacles on the shop floor to contend with when you have to move it around.
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Nov 11, 2010 20:30
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As my stepdad explained to me: there are a huge pile of regulations about how tanks must be secured, which can be quite onerous to do in your garage. However, there is the giant loophole of the cart; an OSHA approved cart can be used to hold tanks, and there's no rule about how long they can be stored in one. So, if you have a cart, you're legal and covered. You certainly need one for transport, anyway - don't get pulled over driving around with loose tanks in your car or truck. That said I'm sure you're right in that it is better to have your tanks secured somewhere, so you don't pull one over while yanking on a hose. e. http://www.ehso.com/oshaConstruction_J.htm Note in particular (a)(10): the fact that you have to store your oxy cylinder at least 20 feet from any flammable/combustable, including the fuel gas cylinder, or with a non-combustable barrier with a 30-minute fire resistance rating, and the laundry list of rules for (a)(11). Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Nov 11, 2010 |
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Nov 11, 2010 21:04
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Leperflesh posted:Yeah fair enough. If you are welding stainless, be sure to be ready to clamp EVERYTHING. Stainless doesn't dissipate heat like mild steel. It will hold the heat and then just warp on you. Super experienced stainless welders even have this problem, but a lot of them have been working with it for years so basically they can tell if they dump a ton of heat in one part, they can just warp it back to true. Good luck! Also, if you want to grind down any welds make sure you use zirconia grinding wheels. If you use regular(cheaper) aluminum oxide wheels, it will impregnate itself into the stainless and the stainless will rust.
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Nov 11, 2010 22:25
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Leperflesh posted:As my stepdad explained to me: there are a huge pile of regulations about how tanks must be secured, which can be quite onerous to do in your garage. However, there is the giant loophole of the cart; an OSHA approved cart can be used to hold tanks, and there's no rule about how long they can be stored in one. So, if you have a cart, you're legal and covered. You certainly need one for transport, anyway - don't get pulled over driving around with loose tanks in your car or truck. If it's just for hobby do you have to follow workplace safety legislation? Also I'm pretty sure the part about 20 feet separation is only for permanent tanks, not portable ones. SmokeyXIII fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Nov 12, 2010 |
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Nov 12, 2010 03:11
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Probably not. I mean, it's not like there are random inspections of your personal workshop at home. But it's still a good idea to be safe with your tanks.
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Nov 12, 2010 04:20
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Slung Blade posted:Probably not. I mean, it's not like there are random inspections of your personal workshop at home. Oh without a doubt, I've got plans for my house (which is getting built right now heck ya garage in the works) where I will just plumb in the gas to the garage and have the tanks on the outside. It sounds sweet in my head if nothing else. Also my grandpa is trading me all his old tools (table saw, drill press!!) along with other stuff for my old PVR. Pretty great deal. Photobucket of house in progress if you types like pictures
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Nov 12, 2010 05:18
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Regarding separation of cylinders by 20 ft or a wall, that is intended more for storage of multiple cylinders as opposed to a single fuel and O2 cylinder hooked up to a torch. Unless you plan on running a small commercial shop or stockpiling cylinders, don't worry about that rule, and just make sure they won't fall over.
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Nov 12, 2010 09:55
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Hey guys, could you give me a couple pointers regarding figuring out the whole "speed and feed" thing? First off, been watching these: http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/130-machine-shop-2 (they're instructional videos demonstrated in the machine shop of the AI laboratory at MIT - what more could you want - and there are 10 of them) Now, I don't even have a drill press yet, I think I might pick one up off craigslist this weekend. So I've been drilling this "weldable steel", the kind you can pick up at Home Depot, I figure its probably just mild or low-carbon steel, with a Craftsman hand drill that is literally older than me. I've been using these Black-Gold bits and also some Cobalt(the brand) Cryo-treated bits. They're the regular helical, spiral bits with a standard point. I don't really have a good idea of what speeds (rpms) I should be drilling at. I know that there is a correlation between drill bit size and speed (larger the bit, lower the speed). I also am pretty lost when it comes to how much pressure I should be applying. At times I've found that it seems like I have to bear down pretty hard on the back of the drill. I always add generous amounts of 3-1 oil, or more recently SAE-30 weight. Should probably get some thread cutting oil, I guess. Wear is one of my biggest concerns. I've found that my bits wear seemingly very quickly. Recently, I've learned that I need to be listening for chatter and have started using much lower speeds. One other question - is there some significant wear problems presented if I were to use the spiraled sides of a normal bit to kind of "mill" out a feature of a piece?
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Nov 19, 2010 03:40
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The Scientist posted:Hey guys, could you give me a couple pointers regarding figuring out the whole "speed and feed" thing? Never, ever, ever use the side of a drill for anything. Drills cut along the edges at the tip, that's it. End mills are for that kind of work, and I wouldn't recommend using those with a drill press, ever. Regarding speed and feed, for mild steels you'll want to stick to below 500 RPM if you're above .500" and above 500 RPM if you're below .500" in drill diameter. At around .250" you should be running closer to 800RPM, and around .750" closer to 180-230 RPM. I used to have to run 1.375" drills through parts on a lathe and I ran that bitch at like, 65 RPM. Get a spray bottle for a water based coolant if you can, but you'll want sulfur cutting oil, not thread cutting oil, that poo poo is too viscous. Feed you are already learning with listening for chatter. Another thing that impacts feed rate for drills is the angle of the point, and the rake of the relief. generally a shallower rake and relief gets you more life, while staying around the same feed of a steeper angle and relief. Sharpening drills is the hard part, get a bench grinder and learn on that, because sharpeners for .500+" drills start getting expensive. P.S. Drilling different steels isn't really a big deal, cold rolled is softest, S-7, 420 SS, and P-20 are all pretty soft, D-2 and A-2 suck for different reasons, H-13 binds like a whore. Just clear your chips every 3/16" and you'll be fine though, especially if you have an air compressor to clear blind holes. Samuel L. Hacksaw fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Nov 19, 2010 |
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Nov 19, 2010 04:06
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How complementary are smelting and blacksmithing? I'd really like to try my hand at blacksmithing, but it seems to be pretty limited by the availability of appropriate raw materials. I can see myself buying everything, getting super-stoked, sloppily repairing two or three of my dad's garden tools and then looking forlornly at my dusty anvil every six months or so. Smelting seems, to me, somewhat the opposite: as far as raw materials go you're only limited by how much appropriate scrap you can round up, but casting stuff doesn't sound nearly as fun as beating the poo poo out of red-hot iron. Combining the two- rendering scrap down into ingots and then pounding out whatever my heart desires- sounds like it's a match made in heaven, but I've never done any of this so obviously I don't know. Ambrose Burnside fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Nov 19, 2010 |
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Nov 19, 2010 15:53
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Alright here is a very unfortunate thing about smelting: It is VERY VERY difficult and VERY VERY DANGEROUS for a home smelter to build something capable of melting iron. It is largely pointless to smith aluminum, through there is some room to smith copper, brass, bronze, silver and gold. So for the home metal worker there will be minimal overlap between smelting and smithing. You smith iron (or iron alloys, like steel), you smelt aluminum (Copper, brass, bronze, silver, and gold being largely too expensive), and there is virtually no overlap. On the upside, a well designed forge can achieve the temperatures required to smelt aluminum. Downside, your first forge is unlikely to be well designed enough to do this if you build it yourself. The last issue is materials; what exactly do you think you will be smelting into, where is metal gong to sit while the temperature increases until it is a liquid? Ceramic crucibles must be carefully babied to prevent them from cracking. Steel crucibles can obviously not be used to melt steel into, because they would melt too; they can be used to melt aluminum, copper, brass, bronze, silver and gold through. As an additional point; smithing is far cheaper then smelting to set up. An ok forge will cost you a day's work, a lot of charcoal, and about $50; OR you can get an O/A welding kit for about $150, and tanks for a steep rental but cheap overall gas and use that as your heating element as well as being able to do O/A welding. An ok anvil will cost you two days work, a bag of cement and a railroad tie (~50), and a good selection of hammers, pliers, and tongs will cost about $50 again with some shopping. So ~$150 and 6 or so full days of work building things. None of it will be great, it will not be viable for making anything larger then palm sized, but it'll do fine for some knives, you can practice some forge welds, and you can get a feel for what your doing. There is no cheap way to get into smelting, due to the high danger involved if materials fail. If you have a very well equipped garage you can build one kind of cheaply in the $150 range, largely in the purchasing of refractory cements and steel bracing, springs, piping, etc; but it assumes you have access to a welder, a metal cutting band-saw, and a great deal of serviceable but scrap material, can weld, and can weld well enough for your life to depend on your welds.
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Nov 19, 2010 20:39
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The Scientist posted:Hey guys, could you give me a couple pointers regarding figuring out the whole "speed and feed" thing? Random points: ...as far as drill speed, you can go as fast or as slow as you want, as long as the drill is cutting smoothly and the chips are coming out silver and not blue (from heat). The typical charts seem to be rather high-RPMs to me, for a dry setup without flood cooling. I run mine quite a bit slower than that, but I am a hobbyist, so I'm not in any hurry. ...cutting fluid of some kind helps a lot with drilling/milling faster. The store-bought fluids tend to smell like burning motor oil in use, which can be an issue if you don't have good ventilation (such as like me--your machinery is indoors, in a room of your house). I use canola oil, it is way better than nothing, doesn't cost much, and doesn't smell--and it still lubes & prevents rust on steel. The only downside is it will leave a gummy film on equipment over time. I just use a dropper bottle--drill ten seconds, lift & squirt in a few drops, repeat. The drill will cut "smooth" when it has oil, and will sound "crunchy" when it needs more. ...drilling metal with a hand-held drill wrecks drill bits, and drills lousy holes--holes that are non-round & not-where-you-wanted-them. There is no way around that. A drill press is a huge improvement; get the biggest & heaviest one you can. ...when drilling thick metal (especially steel) using split-point drill bits makes a big difference in drill pressure. And all drills go dull, and so you want a way to resharpen split-points if you plan on doing this much. The upper-end Drill Doctor is the cheapest & easiest way. ...if you need to exactly place a hole, use a lathe "center drill" bit to start the hole. The nose is stepped but you don't even need to drill a "hole", just cut a cone-shaped depression with the tip. ...as far as "how hard should I push?" the indicator is on the back of the hole: when you get done drilling a hole, look at the other side where the drill came out. There should be very minimal chips "hanging" off the sides of the hole. Big chips means your drill was dull, and you had to push too hard. quote:One other question - is there some significant wear problems presented if I were to use the spiraled sides of a normal bit to kind of "mill" out a feature of a piece? Milling with a drill press can work, but is not ideal. You need to lock the quill (so it cannot extend) and use an x-y table and a very small mill bit (3/16" or less for wood/plastic, and 1/8" for steel/aluminum). You also need to get REAL mill bits, not the Dremel things. Individual 3/16" bits can be bought from typical metalworking suppliers like Enco and MSC, the 1/8" bits you can buy from Performance Micro Tool. When milling, only cut towards-and-away from you, avoid cutting side-to-side because a drill press table (on a column) tends to have a lot of flex sideways. The worst that will probably happen is you may loosen the bearings earlier than normal; they are most-likely a standard size and won't cost much to replace. To detect bearing wear, you will need a .001" dial indicator w/magnetic base to check the quill's runout (how far it can be pushed off-center); cheap ones cost $30 at Grizzly or LittleMachineShop. ~
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Nov 19, 2010 21:43
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Smelting and blacksmithing can go together really well, but it's a very specific type of smelting. Lots of people make home bloomery smelters, but you won't be doing any iron casting with it. Bloomery smelters take iron ore and charcoal and make a really dirty wrought iron. The iron doesn't get hot enough to go fully liquid, but there will be some liquid slag. We did it for thousands of years, so the principles are pretty simple.
Get a whole lot of lump charcoal. Get some iron ore (collect rust from your local scrapyard or something if you can't get ore). Use an appropriate air supply and feed that fire for hours. What you get, if you're lucky and did it right, is this mass of iron with a lot of slag and inclusions in it. Now, while it's hot, you use a really big loving trip hammer (or like 3 guys with sledges) and you beat the poo poo out of it to pound out the loose slag. You have to keep it at welding heat and you gotta draw it out and fold it and re-weld it several times to get something that's usable in the forge. There are a lot of bloomery guides out there, take some time to read them, they're fascinating. I would *definitely* not recommend this for a first timer though. In your case, I would look around for a technical college, a local smith, or a historical village or something where I could try blacksmithing first, before you commit to it as a hobby. That's what I did, and I found that I really enjoyed it, but it's too much of an investment (both monetarily and mentally) to just jump into.
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Nov 20, 2010 00:33
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When I was in Boy Scouts, we did a 70 mile backpacking trip in a place called Philmonte, New Mexico (scout heaven). One place we stopped to camp for the night had a reconstruction of an old town. There was a working blacksmith shack. Except that they made US do all the work. We made an S hook, with some twists in the middle and the ends of the S were wrapped around again. Every time we hit the face of the anvil, we had to sing at the top of our lungs "OH MISS BESSY (the anvil's name) I AM SO SORRY I HIT YOU ON THE FACE" or something equally ridiculous. It was a pretty awesome experience. Edit: Oh, and by the way, we have this dude called a "farrier" come out on a regular basis and shoe all the horses. He's got some cool stuff, including a forge that he carriers around in the back of his little pick-up. Some huge files and tongs, and clippers to shear the nails that hold the shoe on the hoof and go all the way through, out the top of the horse's hoof. They can do some impressive stuff now-a-days as far as modern horse-shoeing. Think orthodic, custom fit shoes. whose tuggin fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Nov 20, 2010 |
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Nov 20, 2010 00:53
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Made a U-Joint for the robot arm I'm working on, with the help of some guidance from some more experienced people ^^^^^^^^.jpg) The U-Joint, next to a 1/2" carriage bolt like the one I "machined" the pieces from. I used the a portion of the smooth shank for the whole thing. Cut the threads myself too. Didn't have any smooth shank 4-40 bolts and nuts, so its held together with an allen wrench and a broken drill bit for the moment. Really not much, but I'm pleased with it. So thanks.
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Nov 21, 2010 00:31
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Great work. I look forward to seeing the finished product!
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Nov 21, 2010 00:51
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Thanks man. I remember reading your awesome lathe thread (jealous). But I 'spose there's no one more deserving of a lathe like that than the guy who knows how to fix it back up and is willing to put in all the work. I was just at Harbor Freight today, and I was checking out this little metal lathe they had. It was 7" x 10" and they had it listed at $499. It seemed alright. But then as I was checking it out, I noticed that under where this shield had come loose, some of the gears were polypropylene  Also, I was checking out small drill presses while this old guy was also checking out drill presses. He said the one he was looking at was brand new but the bed clamp screw was already stripped. Its so hard to resist the temptation to buy one of those things though.
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Nov 21, 2010 01:07
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The Scientist posted:Thanks man. I remember reading your awesome lathe thread (jealous). But I 'spose there's no one more deserving of a lathe like that than the guy who knows how to fix it back up and is willing to put in all the work. 
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Nov 21, 2010 01:33
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Your right. A person like you doesn't deserve a lathe. You probably wouldn't know what to do with it anyway (reverse psychology). Seriously though, what's taking so long? LATHE! How can there possibly be something else that takes precedent over a lathe? Hurry up, cause we all know its gonna be awesome. 
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Nov 21, 2010 16:45
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Slung Blade posted:In your case, I would look around for a technical college, a local smith, or a historical village or something where I could try blacksmithing first, before you commit to it as a hobby. That's what I did, and I found that I really enjoyed it, but it's too much of an investment (both monetarily and mentally) to just jump into. Yeah, I'm already doing this (looking, that is). There are a couple dudes who offer multi-day courses in blacksmithing, I might jump into one of the basic ones and see how much I dig it. Is it possible to make a living as a blacksmith nowadays? I'm not asking because I'm planning on it (lol), I'm just curious. I've always known about farriers, but they're a pretty specific subset of blacksmiths- beyond that, I can only think of the dudes who sit around in pioneer villages and maybe people who do high-end wrought stuff. e: reading about trip hammers- "The head usually weighed a quarter of a ton." 
Ambrose Burnside fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Nov 21, 2010 |
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Nov 21, 2010 18:13
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Sure, it's totally possible to make a living at it. It's not easy though. I think there are 5 or 6 around my end of the world that manage it. You have to be good at it, have a good workspace, know people who are willing to pay, and have all the right tooling. I mean, things like custom wrought iron railings typically cost 5-20 thousand dollars, and most people can't justify shelling out that kind of money for a high-end luxury item. So you have to live somewhere with a lot of rich people who like to decorate their fancy mansions. You can make some extra money on the side making things for people, but it would be pretty hard to make a living making nothing but firesets, candlesticks, candle snuffers, and wall hooks. All for the same reason there are so few blacksmith shops out there these days, we just cannot compete with mass manufactured goods. So to survive, you have to go to the high-end, one-off, custom jobs. To do that, you have to be good, like really good. I'd like to be able to earn a living at it, but there is no way I am even close to being good enough. e: the folks at old-timey villages are either volunteers, guild members who do it for fun, or slave-wage summer students. Sometimes you can earn a living at it, but it's generally just during the summer tourist season. Slung Blade fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Nov 21, 2010 |
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Nov 21, 2010 22:34
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For the record, being a farrier seems totally not worth it. Even the calmest, oldest, most well behaved horse goes wall-eyed and crazy when you try and pound some nails into their hoof. As long as the nail goes in the right way, the don't feel a thing (their hoof is basically like our fingernails), but that's not always the case. Not to mention the fact that our horses are anything but calm or well behaved. I watch the poor dude with his back completely hunched over, struggling to keep the horses hoof pinched between his leather apronned thighs as the horse tries to yank it out. My back's not strong enough for that. Interesting anecdote about our farrier - he used to do it for the army. The army employs farriers to maintain the horses they use in parades and military funerals. But at one point, he was in Iraq and shod Saddam Husein's expensive pure-bred Arabians. I bet if you were versatile enough, you could make a living as a blacksmith. Be creative. For one thing, if you have equipment to smith, you have much of the equipment needed to make glass art. If you were artistic about your metalwork, and maybe made some unique and cool pieces that people would like to have, I can picture it easily being a hobby that earns a little income, at the least. One other thing, guys; I was wondering if maybe you could use a rotary hammer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_hammer#Rotary_hammers to make a nice little trip hammer. They can be had semi-cheap from pawn shops, I'm sure. edit:clarification
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Nov 22, 2010 01:23
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The Scientist posted:
Someone may come up with some strange arrangement where this works, but I am going to outright say 'no' on this one. Trip hammers are about applying a lot of force at a slow controlled rate, with a very flat; understood trajectory. A rotary drill spins a drill bit and hammers that. On a flat metal surface it will be all over the place, and only applying a small amount of force to a small area. On the other hand, a flat hammer head for an air chisel http://www.diseno-art.com/products/tools/air_chisel.html (Just weld a flat head to an existing chisel head) will work wonders on basically anything cold or hot <Small scale>- great for impressing a pattern from a die- still not going to replace a trip hammer; but very cost effective way to replace a thousand hits on hot metal with a ball peen (I have one of these for my garage and use it in body work and shaping applications). Linux Assassin fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Nov 22, 2010 |
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Nov 22, 2010 03:24
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Well there's a hammer drill and a rotary hammer. The difference is that a rotary hammer is capable of linear AND/OR rotational motion. So you could set the rotary hammer on just hammer and it would be an electric version of a jack-hammer, or what you described (which sounds actually like a very good option as well). Dunno EXACTLY how well a rotary hammer would work in this application, though.
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Nov 22, 2010 04:51
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Foamed metal that is, metal turned into a foam by forced air or something: Where can I find it? Is it possible to make it? All I've found online so far are industrial supply companies based in China, etc, that would probably like to sell me a couple tons, but I'm only looking for some smaller pieces. I'm specifically interested in copper, bronze, nickel, aluminum, silver, and gold.
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Nov 22, 2010 19:46
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Why do you want it? Why is it useful? (I don't know anything about it).
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Nov 22, 2010 19:52
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I want to carve it/make sculptures. I like contrasting textures, and I had an idea for an eye made out of a sphere of a silvery foamed metal with bronze and/or gold foam for the iris and something or other for the pupil. It would be cool to combine different foam densities, like, I know they have open cell (like a loofah) and closed cell (like a sponge), and I'm sure they can do all sorts of average cavity size. A figurine sculpture with different features made out of different density foams is really popping in my head too.
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Nov 22, 2010 20:03
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I like turtles posted:I want to carve it/make sculptures. I like contrasting textures, and I had an idea for an eye made out of a sphere of a silvery foamed metal with bronze and/or gold foam for the iris and something or other for the pupil. Foamed metal can be carved? Have you worked with it before? Check our your local metal retailers, or these guys:http://www.metalsupermarkets.com/ They have a store up the street from me (Mentioned simply as a reference for 'they aren't a fly by night') and will do delivery/shipping on small orders. Though they don't have any foamed metal in there regular products, so you may have to contact them.
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Nov 22, 2010 23:00
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Cool, will give them a shot. Haven't worked with it before, but especially for softer metals, I can't imagine it would be *too* bad to work with. I don't expect to just go at it with any old knife, but I think some diamond rasps and stuff would do just fine
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Nov 23, 2010 02:41
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Hey, what can you guys tell me about this: http://spacecoast.craigslist.org/tls/2075194508.html Its a MIGMASTER 250. Has anyone ever heard of the brand Migmaster? A google search provided this: http://products.esabna.com/index.php/library/1172588581_migmaster_250.pdf Will it be a limitation that it's DC only? It looks like its rated for 250 AMPS, which seems comparatively pretty robust. What kind of power input does it need? Would I be plugging it in to an outlet like what my washer runs on? What kind of stuff would I be expecting to weld if I bought this? I'm interested in it, it seems like an amazing deal based on my preliminary google-ing, and its in my town. I've wanted to own a welder since I was in middle school (which is kinda weird, I know) but I know little outside of the differences in arc welding processes. I know the fundamentals of MIG welding, and that I would have to get a tank of sheilding gas. Everything else I'd appreciate insight into, though.  in advanceedit: Or what about this? Holy poo poo something bad must have happened somewhere http://spacecoast.craigslist.org/tls/2075166006.html these tools seem like they're just worth way more than this whose tuggin fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Nov 23, 2010 |
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Nov 23, 2010 04:58
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The brand is actually ESAB, and the model is MIGMASTER. ESAB makes excellent equipment. "DC only" is not a limitation, because all MIG welding is done with DC. Assuming that bitch works, jump on it.
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Nov 23, 2010 07:08
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I agree totally with dv6. Assuming both of them work, I would gladly pay that price for either of them. The welder might require a 3 phase plug in your garage. If you're interested in metal work (or any kind of DIY stuff) it never hurts to have one of those anyway though. Lots of things you can use it for. e: huh, that pdf you linked shows them all as 120v 60hz, so just a robust circuit should be able to handle it I suppose. 50% duty cycle @250 amps is loving great for a home machine. Slung Blade fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Nov 23, 2010 |
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Nov 23, 2010 07:36
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A couple of quick questions. I found some flat (bar?) at the local refuse site, it's mild steel, about 25mm / 1in wide and about 3mm / .11in thick. It's got surface rust, and I was wondering if I needed to wire wheel the rust off before I did any thing to it? I'm hoping to try fusing (welding) a few pieces together in my brake drum forge - just to see if I can do it. Can I also weld together some pieces of that with thinner pieces of hacksaw blade to sort of make a "damascus" kind of thing? Also, does duty cycle relate to the amount of time you can use a welder at full power?
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Nov 23, 2010 10:09
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IDK about MIG but I have never once used over ~150A at home on my TIG and that includes AC on aluminum.
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Nov 23, 2010 13:10
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LeeJam posted:Also, does duty cycle relate to the amount of time you can use a welder at full power? According to one of my favorite books, the "Electronics and Nucleonics Dictionary, Third Edition" from 1966, Electronics and Nucleonics Dictionary posted:1. The time intervals devoted to starting, running, stopping, and idling when a device is used for intermittent duty. 2. The ration of working time to total time for an intermittently operating device, usually expressed as a per cent [sic]. Also called duty factor. 3. The product of pulse duration and pulse repetition frequency, equal to the time per second that pulse power is applied. Also called duty factor. 4. The ratio of pulse width of the interval between like portions of successive pulses, usually expressed as a per cent [sic]. Also called duty factor. 5 Deprecated term for duty ratio in radar.
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Nov 23, 2010 15:48
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LeeJam posted:It's got surface rust, and I was wondering if I needed to wire wheel the rust off before I did any thing to it? LeeJam posted:Can I also weld together some pieces of that with thinner pieces of hacksaw blade to sort of make a "damascus" kind of thing? LeeJam posted:Also, does duty cycle relate to the amount of time you can use a welder at full power? Let's say your machine is 60% duty cycle. That means you can weld at full power for 6 out of ten minutes, and the other 4 minutes are left resting. If your machine is 20% duty cycle then you can weld for 2 minutes at at time. As the current decreases, the duty cycle increases. For example, my Idealarc is 50% duty cycle at 250 amps, but when I'm using it 120 amps or less most of the time, it'll run at 100%. Most of the better machines will have a graph that displays duty cycle over amps in their manual. Another thing to keep in mind, especially in "hobby" welding, is that you will almost never have an arc going for more then 30 seconds at a time, if that. In fabrication there is a lot stopping and starting to fit new poo poo, let the weldment cool so you don't warp it, etc. What I'm saying is, while you should always buy the biggest, most bad rear end machine you can, don't fret over a machine that has a 20% duty cycle, because you will probably never max it out in your garage. If you were doing production MIG welding in a commercial shop, duty cycle can be an important issue.
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Nov 23, 2010 16:00
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AnomalousBoners posted:IDK about MIG but I have never once used over ~150A at home on my TIG and that includes AC on aluminum.
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Nov 23, 2010 16:05
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LeeJam posted:Can I also weld together some pieces of that with thinner pieces of hacksaw blade to sort of make a "damascus" kind of thing? That would be pretty pointless, unfortunately. First off, you would have to forge weld it to get a billet. Welding it electrically would only fuse the edges together. Secondly, why? Mild steel makes for a terrible addition to damascus. If you're going to take the time to try to make it, you should be using two classes of steels. High carbon, and high nickle/chromium. Hacksaw blades are high carbon, so you could get some hardness from that. But mild steel isn't really good for any kind of edge, and there's no significant amount of nickle or chromium in it. The two alloys of steel being joined together depend on this varying nickle content to give it that wonderful variation. One layer shines brightly when etched, and the other is a little duller, but it's very hard, so it's useful to have in there. The look of polished hacksaw blades looks an awful lot like polished mild steel. There is a difference, but it's so small you'd never notice the layers in a pattern welded billet. If it were me, I would just try to forge weld the hacksaw blades into a small billet on their own. You could make a nice edge with that or a decent tool (done correctly of course).
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Nov 23, 2010 18:20
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"Damascus" (actually, pattern-welded metal) is also used for art objects, and in those cases, you want contrasting metals, not necessarily hard or tough or hard & tough metals. I have seen very nice contrast between mild steel and straight nickel. I would not bother forge-welding hacksaw blades because they're so thin. I'd want a billet made from much thicker pieces, so that I could draw it out and shape it and twist it to make patterns, and also, so I'd lose less material (as a percentage of the total) to scale, while heating. With really thin metal, any kind of drawing is going to 'break through' the layers in points, leaving you with either a messy swiss cheese or just a poorly incorporated alloy.
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Nov 24, 2010 00:20
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