Anything welding

Seeing as how the chest is on casters, I'd imagine it'd just need a small "base" for the tank to stand on, additional casters (for supporting the added weight being offset), a "rest" with loops for a safety chain, and that's it?

 

Pretty much the plan. Will be making a frmae for the chest to sit in. With room for the tanks. Orginal casters. Safety chains for the tanks an cord holders

 

When I did mine, I just thought it up in my head then cut the parts out like a kit

 

Tig welding is so addictive, I need to start doing it more.

This is 316 and the right grossness is where I didnt see that the part was super thin. This was just a slug from a wire EDM cutting out a part.

Still doing scratch start with my MIG 180, and I was running low on gas.

 

Got sent this pic today asking if I could cut it on the PT.?

I have no idea where to start. I think I'm gonna pass...she wants it for a wedding gift on 10/12!

Oh, and she wants to know if it could be 6" x 6"?

Just like my favorite rail road company after the merger ...

Norfolk and Weigh.

 

I know you can import an image on Fusion 360 and trace over it. However, that is a lot of tracing and curves requiring many reference points. I’m sure @Kwikvette is probably efficient enough to knock it out but something like that would take me while to sort out.

 

That one looks busy for sure

For an image like that, I'd most likely still trace it but when there's more contrast, even Inkscape does a pretty good job of doing so

For parts, I'll trace, then scale up to a known dimension

 

I got no problem using f360 to trace and scale, I just don't know what the gal will allow me to remove or enhance.

The short notice is kind of annoying.

 

That's one main reason why I don't take on that sort of stuff

I'm saving a friendship if I just deny said work cause in order for it to work, I'm gonna decide what goes and what stays

 

Yeah, that drawing would take me at least 2 hours to clean up after conversion, or to trace it on a canvas. Then at only 6" x 6", the font would be impossibly small to cut with plasma. I'd have to go single line to cut it since I'm not wealthy enough to roll anything but a Chinese cutter (@Kwikvette ). Now that the joke's been laid down, I do actually have an older Hypertherm that I took in on truck sale that's just sitting in the garage. That font would still be too small unless those Hypertherm fine cut consumables work miracles.

A lot of the detail like on the head dress would be lost. I think you made a wise call on that one.

 

If you don't have a $4k plasma cutter with a $15k CNC table, do you even CNC bro?

 

I had posted this elsewhere, but for those here keeping tabs here I thought I'd give you guys an update as well.

I went ahead and glued together the drain and refill for the table. The way you see it held is the way I plan to run it underneath the table due to limited clearance with the reservoir being so tall.

Before you say anything, yes I know the ball valve is below the filter but this is because I do not expect to remove the filter anytime with water in the table. Plus with the way it's oriented it sits between running vertical and horizontal for filtering shit out.



Moving forward, I wanted to fill as much of the hole in the flanges since they were huge so I had to enlarge the holes in the table. I tell you, it was a fucking pain in the ass drilling through hardened stainless steel. I say hardened due to all the heat from plasma cutting.

These are the bolts I'll be running, and to make the setup as waterproof as possible, I'm running bonded washers with some plumbers tape wrapped around the threads. Nylock nuts will be used to hold everything together.



I had bought some stainless steel mesh to run as my initial "filter" before the water drains and I had a back and forth with myself about how I'd like to incorporate it while keeping it waterproof.

This is what I came up with - below the table I'm running a gasket I cut out myself, mesh in the middle, and the gasket I bought with the flanges.



Went ahead and filled the table with water and so far no leaks, however the real test is to leave it as such overnight.





For my refill part of it, I will be running this at the reservoir's drain along with vinyl tubing to feed into a transfer pump.

On the output side of the pump, I'll have to run it up towards the second ball valve so it feeds back into the table.



With all this progress I was sure I'd be cutting stuff this weekend, especially since my new Z axis assembly arrived!



I was expecting just the Z axis part of it but they also sent the rear mount that sits on the gantry tube as well.



Old one next to the new; the bolts on the old one were so tight, I saw sparks when I broke the torque on the bolt holding it to the lead screw coupler (a first for me).



Got the mount installed, and went through the process of tramming it and ensuring it was square.



Thinking I was almost done, my heart sank when I found this shit.



Anyone that has a THC setup and runs a Langmuir CNC table knows this is the tab in your Z axis assembly holding the spring for IHS. With this broken, IHS and THC are both worthless so I'm at a standstill.

By the time I had opened the package up and found that this was broken, Langmuir had already closed down for the day so I won't be able to talk to them until Monday.

Another week of my table being down

 

Lots of " likes" and one " no likes"!

 

Pretty incredible and thorough breakdown. I concur with the above and sympathize with the level depression when things like this are discovered right at closing time on a Friday.

 

Good news, table was still full.



Underneath, it seems like a single droplet had hit the floor.

Checking the entire flange it was completely dry and the only wet spot I found was between the elbow and the unglued piece of PVC leading to the reservoir.



It's not glued because I haven't made the metal mesh for the right side drain and wasn't ready to glue everything in place.

This is where a drop was forming (but hadn't yet).

 

There really needs to be a "no like" button! All the QC fails coming from Langmuir are a little astonishing. Still, I do admire the value proposition, but that has to be costing them serious $$. Langmuir support has been stellar, I'm just sad I've had to use it so much!

Anyway, I am knee deep in bending. Nothing to report so far other than the thing does work. I ran a few bends just with the machine as is, no special calibration and it's close. I made a bunch of 5052 and CRS plates to bend to calibrate angle and back gage.

I've found dialing in the angle to be easy, and once dialed (for a specific tool, material, bend length, and grain direction) it's REALLY repeatable.




Something is off with my pattern or the back gage tho. Too many variables I haven't checked/already know are wrong to even guess what's going on so that will have to wait... (.020 under the bend length and my leg is still .010 too long)



But change any of those factors and the bend changes. I was hopeful that once a material is dialed, changing the bend length in bend control would lead to a perfect bend, but I didn't factor in grain direction (or something else I don't know about yet) and it threw the bend off.



So, I am going to 'bend school' to see if I can get closer on first tries. My goal is to be able to knock out a 16 ga, 12ga, or 3/16 CRS or 5052 bends on first tries, so getting the radii and k-factor right so my flat patterns come out correct is crucial. Then I can walk in a bend if needed, but if the pattern is wrong, I'm screwed.

I think I'm going to have to:
- carefully re-calibrate the machine and measure actual punch and die heights. I was just going with Langmuir's specs...
- match up Fusion's k-factor and bend radii to what I'm actually seeing at the press given my tooling. I will be making rules called "ZNC 12 ga CRS" and "SCS .125 5052" Etc...
- get some test blanks (WHERE IS MY PLASMA TABLE?) in different lengths/grain direction and go all @Kwikvette on the 'dialing' process.

One (more) thing I'm finding annoying about Fusion is that bend radii is set up as a factor of material thickness, but that's not how it works IRL! If you're air bending the bend radii is also a factor of the die opening! I am thinking back to all the crazy shit I engineered as a youth with no clue! LOL!

FWIW this is a fantastic reference: https://sendcutsend.com/guidelines/bending/

 

Yep it's why I ran into my issue with those bed stiffeners where the flange and hole distance was thrown off a whole 1/32" to 1/16".

Sure it might not sound like a lot, especially for plasma cutting the parts being bent, but I needed it to be far more accurate to account for manual bending (for us poors). I can't expect to scribe and bend everything exactly the same each time, but I can try.

I'm doing bottom bending which like you said, is different than air bending.

 

Totally! I am still trying to figure out what kind of tolerances are going to be realistic with my setup.

 

PS... Like this post if you'd like to see all this in an "Anything Bending" thread, instead of here! Ha ha...