Silver Case

First Half of the Day: T-fillets

Middle Part of the Day: Luke, Lee, Woei, Ling, Nini, Ling’s mom, Australian Cherries.

Last Half of the Day: Cordura Applique on waxed canvas

Tekkou shirt, Sperian helmet, #7 Gas Lens. And scrap tubing.

During the week I collected gas lenses, thoriated tungstens (including 1mm), er70s-3 filler rods, a new regulator, and a beuatiful Optrel Satellite helmet. Then I went to work today practicing with my new machine.

I spent the day exclusively welding on 1mm thick cromoly steel. The easiest way to get a lot of joint to weld is to slice one side of a 6″ length of tubing, then lay a bead sealing that up. Then rotate and make another cut, repeat.

The rule of 1A per 1/1000″ thickness is pretty accurate there. I was using between 35 and 39Amps for continuous welding. I experimented with the pulsed welding some, but I still want to do more experiments with the parameters. I tended to lay bigger beads higher up on the metal, which doesn’t look necessary or right or nice on thinwall tubing.

Trying to be uniform and consistent

Next goal from here? Just lay lots of lengths of nice, controlled beads. By then, my ship should have arrived, and I can start practing welding mitered tubes.

Fafner und Fasolt. [In need of chains to anchor them to the wall]

I had two full-sized bottles of Argon delivered today, so after work I dashed to the workshop to test my machine. Fafner and Fasolt had one last surprise for me though — despite me specifically asking the dolt at the welding gas shop — my Harris 355 regulator wouldn’t fit the bottle! Really annoying. [I should have brought the thing with me] They’re both right-hand-tighten threads, but the Harris regulator is just modestly bigger than whatever this asian spec is, so it doesn’t fit.

Madness!

In a fighting spirit, I took another regulator that does fit the bottle, but doesn’t fit the welder gas input. I chopped a piece of air compressor hose and spliced a connection with hose clamps. Gross, but it worked. If this was acetylene or oxygen, this wouldn’t have been a great idea, but it’s just an inert gas. The worst thing that might happen is that the splice sucks some oxygen inline and contaminates the shielding gas.

Not a thing of beauty

But that wasn’t the case. This machine is nuts! The High Frequency starting mode is scary — I started an arc four inches from the work piece when I was trying to purge the gas line of dirty air. I did a few lap joints on some 1/4″ mild steel pt late and then a butt-joint of two pieces of 1.0mm thinwall cromoly tubing.

The butt-weld was funny. I need more experimentation at these low-current jobs. With a cool tube and lower current (20amp) I got a bead. After the small tubing segments got hot, the welds looked more like an autogenous weld with way too much penetration into the back of the weld.

This all doesn’t mean much, because I really couldn’t see what I was doing on the butt weld. I was using a spare helmet from the shop which seemed to be a total piece of shit. Basically I realized after (too long) a while that I was welding without the auto-darkening engaged. That’s bad. I had quite substantial Nanny flash-bulb eyes. Even now they feel weird, although the bright white ball in my eyes’ center is gone. I am guessing that at these very low currents I should consider using a fixed mask, not an auto-darkening one. I think they don’t trigger well enough in these low power situations.

Anyway, I’ve got a three-day weekend coming up, so I’m looking forward to more extensive practice.

My welder arrived last week. Haven’t used it yet, though…it requires a single-phase 30A service. I don’t have that. Currently I have three-phase circuits plus lower-amperage single phase supply. The electrician is going to come in Saturday morning and add a 30A single circuit to my workshop. As well, the plug Lincoln uses (NEMA 6-50 P/R) is not standard in Singapore. So I’ll have to change that connector to the Singapore standard.

If the plug does not fit, you must acquit.

In the meantime, I have other issues to sort out. For one, assembling a bunch of precision tooling jigs I received from Maine after a couple months’ wait. It’s an even more interesting task given that there are no reference materials.

Many, many pieces inside that box

Anwyay, if I am lucky, by next weekend (a three-day weekend!) I’ll be melting metal.

Last time I was in Tokyo, I went to Mannen-ya, a clothing store forTobi, Japanese construction workers. I bought several pairs of Tobi pants and a two Tekkou shirts. I already had a Japanese designer’s shirt (agribeaspo) that was based on Tekkou-styling, so I figured I should go authentic and get a real Tekkou shirt. They’re great for welding in.

がいじん 鳶

Today I wore my most modestly-sillhouetted Tobi while doing some brazing practice. Ling loves these pants too, but I bought them loose for me (95 waist) and so they’re impossible for her. I’ll be back in Tokyo this weekend, so I’ll find other Tobi shops.

I love wearing the stuff. I can’t wait to be in cool weather so I can wear my tobi-style mint green jacket, something I’ve had my eye on for six years, before I even knew these stores existed.

Looks like my collection of tools, books, and ebay treasures will soon be picked up by the trucking company soon and sea-cargo’d to Singapore. My jigging equipment from Sputnik is due within days. And finally on friday I placed my order for a Lincoln Invertec v205 AC/DC welding machine to be air-freighted to Singapore.

It’s a brilliant machine, like Dad’s Miller– a 35lb inverter that has all the waveform and power control circuitry I could need from as low as 6amp to as high as 200amp. So everyone will have to brace themselves for Christmas presents this years…

Ostensibly I have two welding classes left. Today and next week. So why am I blogging instead of welding?

I set up today, only found about eight 4×5″ pieces of aluminum left to practice on. Pissed around a bit doing a few butt welds. Then I needed more metal.

Me: Where’s more metal ?

Instructor: [checks box, finds it's empty] That was all that was allocated for this class, you’ll have to use the scrap.

Me: [staring] What am I supposed to do with that? [points to a shelf full of mutilated, torched, melted, twisted aluminum IED shards]

Instructor: Well you can find some straight edges amongst the scrap

Me:  Did I sign up for a TIG Class or a seminar on Pakistani ship-breaking?

Instructor: [Blank stare, picks at the pile of scrap]

Me: [walks away] [packs up, leaves]

So de facto the class is over, with two classes remaining. Considering that attendance of the class was about 50%. If everyone had attended, we’d have run out of material even quicker. Absurd. Hardly matters, I only learned what i figured out myself. My instructor was a proctor, not a teacher.

Well, at least I now know how shitty ITE is, and can do away with any romantic notions of bothering to get a Precision Engineering diploma there. Poorly-equipped labs and useless teachers. I am sure between the internet, professional friends, and practice in my workshop I can learn more effectively. I don’t need the rubbish paper.

I’m falling into a progressively worse mood. I was already mad when I arrived at the welding lab today because for the previous hour I’d been trying to figure out why the powerfeed (threadscrew/feedrod) on my lathe isn’t working. I think I eliminated operator stupidity. Now I’m hoping it’s a sheared safety pin rather than something more profound. Problem is, I still cannot figure out how to get axis to the frontbox of the lathe — it’s encased in cast iron. Ugh.

Had my second practical TIG session last night. I did lots of stringer beads and then switched to welding butt joints.

I tried out a tight-fitting rubberized glove so that I could feed the rod more smoothly. That worked for about one minute before I started smelling burning rubber, so I switched back to the baggy leather glove. Somehow I finally got the hang of using that glove and could feed sufficiently ok. I could add probably a half-meter of aluminum filler rod to a 10cm stringer bead, which gives some sense of how smoothly and quickly I need to be able to feed the filler.

My butt welds were not too bad. The top bead looks good but I am getting only partial penetration of the joint. I tried multiple permutations of feeding more filler rod into the pool as well as lingering the arc longer over each pool, but neither improved the result satisfactorily. I increased the amperage (I thought slightly) but that produced way too much heat and gave me a flat, pooled bead and still didn’t penetrate that well.

This is where the class annoys me… I see the issue and want to solve it, but:

1) The teacher knows essentially nothing about welding. He can offer no useful advice. He’s not a welder, he’s an airplane ground engineer.

My school TIG Welder

2) There is no manual for the stupid DYNA TIG 201AC/DC machine I’m using, so I am guessing at how to control the machine. The controls are sparsely labelled. I looked for an online manual but didn’t find much more than an information flyer.

Plus the machine is a piece of shit, the machine keeps overheating on me. Miller has a useful online reference book. It says AC machines need a big bank of resistors to help get rid of some sort of DC flow that builds up in the circuit (current flow when the electrode is positive is not so good I think). I suppose these resistors are what’s overheating. Why can’t the cooling fans be sufficient to work? The machine is claimed to have a 60% duty cycle. I think that’s a joke.

Anyway, this is giving me practice, and I am doing my own independent practice. I’ll be looking forward to better education at Lincoln in June.

In retrospect, instead of increasing amperage, I should have adjusted the balance control to increase the Electrode Negative percentage, so that I get more penetration and less cleaning action. Duh. Shit, wish I had realized it at the time. I thought my cleaning zone was already fairly small.

Sulaiman at work with his problematic machine

Today was our first practical session of the TIG welding class we’re taking at ITE. It went way better than I’d feared. I’ve heard so much about how difficult it is to TIG weld that I was planning for the worst. There is a piece of TIG-testing metal in Sulaiman’s shop that looks like it had been involved in an IED attack in Fallujah. I figured that’s what my welds were going to look like. But in fact, I could make somewhat even fish scale fillets on a sheet.   

Biggest surprise? The arc is much more manageable than I’d feared. It is sort of like brazing without the hysteresis. In fact, I jumped ahead a lesson near the end of class and tried to do some butt joints on old scrap. The top side looked pretty ok, but the penetration wasn’t sufficient. That’s saying that I actually need to linger over the metal longer than I did. I came into class fearing I’d be “blowing holes” into metal left-and-right.

Biggest problem? I was wearing these horrible, horrible China-made gloves. The finger lengths are absurd. Against all odds, my thumb is actually not as long as my middle finger. Consequently it was quite hard to feed the filler rod smoothly, the largest impediment to beautiful fillets. I’ll have to buy some proper welding gloves before our next class. I have a pair of marvelous workshop gloves that fit perfectly, but they have some non-leather parts and I’m scared of melting a molten glove on my hand — the heat is quite intense, particularly when I’m running low on filler rod (or doing a bad job of feeding it, ending up with my hand close to the arc)

(*) As a side note, I love the “Mechanix” (size L) gloves I bought at Blug Lug in Tokyo. The fit is unbelievably perfect. Somehow they don’t make my hands sweat, either. I wear them almost constantly in the workshop. They’re comfortable, prevent my acidic (and copious) sweat from rusting my frame tubes, and allow me to touch quite hot tubes while I’m brazing, giving me better positioning. I’d give them 5 stars and declare them perfect if I hadn’t managed to make a small slice in one of the thumbs somehow. I hope they are durable and this was just a lucky razor-cut on a bit of flashing or something.

Other problem: I think I managed to blind myself a tiny bit. I never looked at anyones’ welding, but I did notice a few times that I could see white light bouncing off my leather apron up into my mask. Perhaps I didn’t have it closed down sufficiently. Oops. Well, I’m not seeing spots, my eyes are just tired, so lesson learned. Perhaps I should dig up all those nice turtlenecks I used to wear in high school.

Anyway, I’m quite enthused by this class and I’m looking forward to my full-on training at Lincoln in June.

I checked frame alignment of the 9Velo today. Not too bad. Maybe a millimeter twist in the headtube, but acceptable. Now that I know how to develop good fillets, I can tack the next frame more deliberately and go for a totally straight frame. But at any rate, this one is straighter than Le Chacal, and I never noticed any shimmy in Le Chacal.

Spent the rest of the day (which wasn’t that long) fussing with the chain stays. Fortunately Michel came in and said that they wanted derailleur dropouts, not the nasty horizontal track dropouts I was planning to use. That saved me from some ugly re-work.

I refilled the welding gases and then at 6:30 we had the first class of our eight evening Aerospace TIG Welding class. The “Aerospace” in “Aerospace TIG Welding” maybe gives this class a sexiness it doesn’t actually have. Aerospace in ITE’s diction, seems to simply mean that we’re going to do a lot of simplistic plate aluminum welding. Not exactly what I want to learn but at least a start. Welding butt and lap joints of aluminum plate is not the same as welding the intersections of 0.6mm-thick steel. Hopefully some training from Brew will help out on that matter.

Flammable Gas transport vehicle