Multi-purpose Welding Cart

August 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[Todd Harrison] put together a welding cart that has all kinds of tricks built-in. The carcass is a cheap rolling cart that has been reinforced with steel plate and beefier wheels. The top tray can be loaded up with fire brick for oxygen-acetylene welding or with a grate for cutting. That grate lets the slag fall through and into the red-rimmed fire-box below. Finally, there’s a steel plate to the right of the cart that rotates and slides over the top of the unit to prepare it for MIG welding. Todd walks us through his versatile invention in the video after the break. This will nicely augment your other welding hacks.

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Flux-cored To MIG Welder Conversion

April 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 32 Comments

[Rob] sent us some information on how he converted his flux-cored welder to a metal inert gas welder. He used a piece of DOM tubing as a collet with a side inlet tube that he uses to inject carbon dioxide. The gas is sourced from a 12 ounce paint ball CO2 tank and it looks like there’s a valve right at the junction with the collet. We wonder how long it would take to tear through one of those tanks, but if you’re not doing a lot of MIG welding this saves on the upfront cost of buying a separate setup.

Meat Smoker From 55gal Drums

December 31, 2009 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

[Joel] wanted to use his newly acquired welding skills to make something useful. With tasty flesh in mind he put together this meat smoker. What resulted is incredible, but the fact that he then gave it away as a gift is just amazing.

A curved joint between two pipes is known as a ‘fish mouth’. They can be a hassle, as with the pirate wheel project, but [Joel] used his noggin to make things easier. He first modeled two 55 gallon drums in CAD. The intersecting curve was then generated by the software, printed out on paper, and stenciled on the drum to be cut out with a jigsaw.

[Joel’s] writeup is greatly detailed and shares many pictures. He makes every part of this smoker, including the wood handles and the stainless steel grates. The guy really knows how to build stuff, but we should have known that after seeing the Crushtoberfest.

Argh, Thar Be A Big Wheel

November 18, 2009 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

If you’re marooned on a desert island, you want to have a Professor who can build useful items out of coconuts. [LostMachine] is one of those guys, and he’s currently building a land-loving pirate ship. The wacky vehicle will use the giant wheel above to propel the vessel while the captain sits comfortably in the lofty crow’s nest. A crack-pot concept? Not really, he plans to take this to Burning Man where it will be a fairly useful build compared to the folks who have really gone off the deep end.

The story here is the build quality. Take some time to watch his videos which we’ve embedded after the break. In the first, he details his method for creating a precisely level building surface on top of his uneven driveway. This is accomplished by welding supports in a circle that are level compared to the center point. He goes on to share his liquid-cooling system for cutting the pipe supports with a custom-built jig and an old windshield washer water system pump from an RV (second video). The final video shows the construction of the wheel which came in with 2000 welds and about 250-300 hours of construction time.

If you hadn’t guessed, [LostMachine] is a structural engineer. Unfortunately he was laid-off this spring which has put a damper in his building schedule. We hope that with a quality project like this in his portfolio a new job is just around the corner for him.

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How-to: Build Your Own Spot Welder

June 23, 2009 by Steve Watkins 85 Comments

Spot welders are used in the fabrication of automobiles, PC cases, power supplies, microwave ovens, electrical junction boxes, Faraday cages, and various electronics. A spot welder is used because it produces a highly defined point of contact weld. The materials are welded without excessive heating, so working pieces are handled easily. The weld is also highly controlled and repeatable. In this how-to we cover the basics of a spot welder, and then show you how to build one from a microwave oven transformer.

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High Frequency Start Box

January 19, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 52 Comments

start_box

When welding with an AC arc welder, it is often necessary to “scratch start” them to get the arc going. For those unfamiliar, it is just like it sounds. You drag the head across something just like a giant match. There are some that come with an arc stabilizer or “high frequency starter”. This is preferred, but they can be hard to find. [Bill] shows us how to make one of our own. Though you may have an easy enough time finding a big transformer, you might run into some difficulty finding the capacitors, and tungsten spark gaps. If you manage to get your hands on them, you can follow [Bill]’s schematic and build one of these starters for yourself.

Columbus Day: What Are You Working On?

October 13, 2008 by Eliot 50 Comments

Wow, Caribbean Conquest Day is such a dull holiday. If it’s a holiday at all: we’re at work today and you probably are too. We decided to post what we’re working on in hopes of breaking out of our holiday slump. Pictured above are two IR illuminator boards we assembled this weekend. We bought the kits from BG Micro. We’re planning on testing their camera blocking ability once we come up with a ~13V portable power source.

That’s what we’re doing. What have you been working on lately?

(If anyone can find a source for the welding goggles in the picture, we’d love to hear it.)