Snell-Pym

A long time ago now, when this blog was in its infancy, I wrote about how I had picked up a cheap manual metal arc welding set from B&Q since I needed to make some tools that would survive within the environment of the furnace. My existing metal-joining technology, silver soldering (aka brazing) would produce joints that would melt like butter at 600 degrees Celsius or so, which is a far cry from the thousand-degree environments I play with...

But as I mentioned slightly earlier, arc welding is easy to get wrong. I learnt from a book, so had only written descriptions to go by, and I was hard put to know what I was doing wrong that made my welds all messy.

Well, today I attended the Insight into Welding course at the Rural Skills Centre, which is near Cirencester, a short drive away from where I live. I had been looking for a welding course for a while - most of the courses I saw advertised at local colleges were formal affairs that took several days and ended up with you taking some kind of assessment, and ending up with an NVQ. All rather formal and constrained.

The Rural Skills Centre, however, does lovely little one-day or several-evening informal courses in all sorts of useful workshop skills. My welding course began with the instructor asking what the seven participant's past experience was, and what they hoped to learn - and then taught us just what we wanted to know, starting at the right level for us. Rather than having a fixed syllabus to be assessed against, we were basically paying to spend a day in a workshop with an experienced welding instructor. Which was perfect!

He quickly sorted out my arc welding problem - I held the electrode too far from the work, so it spattered all over the place and didn't heat the metal properly, thus creating a weld consisting of lots of little blogs sitting on top of the metal rather than bonding into it. Easy once you've seen how it's done properly

So having already got my money's worth before lunchtime, I practiced with the manual metal arc machine for a while, then moved up to try MIG welding - Metal Inert Gas. This is a much fancier setup than arc welding; the machine feeds a metal wire and shielding gas into the work for you when you pull a trigger, rather than you needing to manually control the distance between the end of an unweildy electrode and the work to within a few millimetres. As long as you have the voltage and wire feed speed controls on the machine set correctly for the wire you're using, the metal you're joining, and the kind of join you're doing, it's point and click - just hold the tip of the tool to the metal, pull the trigger, and keep the tip moving along smoothly, and you end up with lovely nice welds. Of course, knowing how to set the controls up right is the hard part, but we were taught foolproof techniques to home in on the correct settings.

So I spent much of the day practising with that, producing various kinds of joins in various thicknesses of mild steel. I'm quite taken by MIG welding - the equipment is a bit more expensive to buy and run than manual metal arc kit, but it produces vastly superior welds, and can be used on aluminium (manual arc can't do that).

But the best process for aluminium is TIG welding. A TIG welder doesn't put any metal out at all - it just produces intense head by driving an arc from a tungsten needle to the workpiece, while spraying the area with shielding gas like a MIG welder does. You have to feed your own extra metal in by hand to make the joint. But it's incredibly neat; the arc is tiny, and still - in the other processes the arc always seems to jump about a bit. The TIG arc was like a little flame a few millimetres long, and underneath it, the metal melted into a shiny puddle. Since it was so small you couldn't go very fast with it, but it produced incredibly neat welds! However, sadly, the TIG welding equipment is quite expensive, since the power supply needs to do some quite specialist regulation to create that easy-to-control neat arc!

So I'm going to keep practising my arc welding - but I'll be keeping my eye out for a MIG welder if I find one cheap or if I get rich... and I certainly wouldn't say not to a TIG if I somehow manage to find one I can afford!

When we moved in, I was very excited about the prospect of turning the little garage into a foundry. Even thought it started off tidy and I optimistically hoped that I'd have finished my backlog of work by the time I had all my tools moved in, I ended up busy all the time and it slowly filled with boxes of stuff.

However, come the flood, we had to move much of the contents of our home out into storage. Then more, as the electrician needed to rewire the whole place, so we moved most of the large static boxes from the little garage (our vast crockery+cutlery+glasses empire, our Christmas decorations, our bulky garden toys, that sort of thing). And the nice electrician put many more power points around it (three double sockets spaced out, rather than one waaay at the back!).

And then at the house-re-warming party, my pyromaniac nerd friends got all excited about the fabrication possibilities of the foundry...

So, I've been clearing the place out, and tidying up the results of several years of things-being-shoved-in. And sealing up the gaps, too; after the garage was built against the house it seems to have moved several centimetres away from it. Somebody went around the outside sealing the gap with cement, but they missed a big bit behind the gutters, meaning that daylight shines in through the gap.

A few months back I went up a ladder and packed the gap with cement.

But there's still a bit of light peeking through, and some more up where the roof is (although, by some miracle, no sign of water coming in when it rains), and a large cobweb-infested dark gap around the inside.

So I've been going around the INSIDE sealing the gap up with expanding foam (a delightful material to work with).

The foam didn't go as far as I'd thought - I need to sort out some more...

And putting foam strips around the front door to seal the gaps there up, too, and putting a block of wood in to fill a hole in the door jamb, in the hope that the place will stop being a haven of creepy-crawlies.

You can easily spent £25 on a large spirit level. Even a cheap 60cm one costs £10.

Since I have some plans to build a wall across uneven ground, a long spirit level to check my footings are level is a requirement. But I didn't want to spend a lot of money.

So I went into B&Q and, for £5 plus a few tens of pence, picked up a two-metre length of extruded steel box section, a square tube about 1cm on a side and strong enough to not flex noticeably under its own weight.

And for about £2.70 I picked up a small hand-held magnetic spirit level unit.

Combining the two, voila - for under a tenner, I have a two-metre long spirit level.

And although there's only two vials in the magnetic level unit, it has the functionality of a level with lots of vials, since I can position those two vials at any point along the level I require. So I can have them in the middle, for traditional "is this rubble-filled trench roughly level" checking. Or, when nailing a series of pegs into the ground and wanting them to all be at the same height, I can bring the vials to one end of the steel tube, balance the other end on an existing peg (ideally with a helper to hold it there!), and easily read the vials as I adjust the peg I'm leaning my end of the tube on.

And when I'm sick of building walls, I can store the pocket-sized magnetic level away, and think of something useful to make with two metres of steel square tubing, an arc welder, and a brazing set...

Yesterday, my mate Seth was trying to fix his car exhaust pipe. It had a bit that was made out of corrugated metal tubing, presumably to allow one end of the pipe to vibrate with the engine while the other is fixed.

Anyway, in the way of these things, with all the vibration and heat, it had broken off at one end, leaving the fragmented end of the corrugated thin metal tubing; now without the straight bit of tubing that would nicely clamp around the next bit of pipe.

So we decided to braze it - and due to the scale of the job and the small scale of my supplies of silver solder, to old-school braze it with real brass. After a lot of angle grinder work cleaning the corrugated tube end up and preparing an extension tube made from a tin can (ground down to reveal the steel sheeting within), we smeared a load of flux paste on, heated it up to a orange-ish red, squirted MORE flux paste on, and applied some brass rod I had lying about. (more...)

My father Lionel and stepmother Lynn were here to stay for a day again, so while Lynn took Sarah shopping, Lionel sorted out the little garage I am planning to make into my metalwork shop.

He did such a great job:

...that there's more space than I had hoped for, so I will instead make it into my full metal workshop. I was planning on just doing the forging and casting in here, and shouldering the metal machining into my grandfather's old workshop - but that can now stay as a wood workshop.

I just need to wait for the rest of my tools and the foundry stuff to arrive - hopefully not before I finish my backlog of work, because it would be frustrating to have it all there waiting to be set up when I don't have the time...

Lionel also found time to enjoy feeding Jean:

Whereas I, in an honest effort to (in one stroke) keep her warm, absorb any more partially-digested milk that should come out, and keep her sitting upright (which she likes, and cmplains if laid down when she's feeling inquisitive), managed to make her look like a Boohbah: