Once the magic smoke comes out, things don't work any more.
John Kasunich
jmkasunich@fastmail.fm
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Thu, 01 May 2008
All the real welders can start laughing now
I went to the NAMES (North American Model Engineering) show a couple weeks ago. I've been wanting to learn to weld for several years now. There was a salesman doing demos of the Cobra 2000 (aka Henrob 2000) Torch. Of course the salesman makes it look easy. I succumbed to the demo, and bought a torch. Today I finally got all the other bits and pieces, and started playing with it.
The "starter kit" comes with a few pieces of steel for you to practice welding on. My first attempt at welding two of them together resulted in one piece of steel, but it wasn't very pretty. For real practice I'd probably need about 50 pieces. But since I only had three, I spent the next hour or so abusing the piece that I welded together - just running beads every which way, melting holes in it and then trying to fix them, etc.
When that got old, I started looking around for things to weld. They say when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, when you have a brand new torch, everything wants to get welded. But I didn't really find much. I did find a pair of brackets, I think they once held reflectors on a bicycle. So I welded them together:
The brackets were fairly thin - 0.040 by my calipers. I looked around and found some thicker stuff. A couple of pieces of 1/8" x 3/4" flat steel. So I butt welded them together. The first pass didn't quite get complete penetration, but it stood up pretty well when I tried bending it. I flipped it over and did the back just to make sure.
I soon got tired of looking for pieces of metal to abuse, when I thought of nails. My stock of 2-1/2" finishing nails is a bit depleted now - it took three tries (at six nails each) before I got this:
More practice is clearly needed - this weekend I'm gonna go digging through the scrap metal pile and see what I can come up with.
(posted: 01 May 2008 21:08) (permalink)