There is a company right down the street from me that claims to have the only 6Gr certified aluminum weldor in the state of Georgia. They claim this right on their home page. You could try contacting them to see if you can pick that guy's brain. http://www.wilsonweldingservice.com/index.php It's wor...

while welding I am forever moving that pedal around, generally with a haphazard push of the foot, as I reposition myself to tackle another part of the project I'm on. I used to fight with my pedal all the time and got really tired of that shit. Now I position it before I start welding and when it m...

The only time i ever welded iron was in a gate fab shop. I ask the guy I'm working with: So Doug-E-Fresh, if these pickets are cast iron then how are we gonna keep it from cracking when we weld it? His reply was the same as yours.....peen it with a hammer. I can't imagine trying to do what you're at...

Holy crap dude,
That's the cat's nuts! Big, hairy, swaggering nuts made out of brass that clang together like a bell when the cat walks!!!
#AWESOMENESS

I've never had that happen but metal contracts and expands just like everything else. You may have had your drive rollers tightened to the bare minimum of what works and when everything got cold, both the drive rollers and the wire contracted leaving room for slippage. Preheating base metal with a t...

Hmmmm. Looks like HTP and Everlast might be the same company. These things rolled off of the same assembly line anyway. Mine is almost as noisy as an attic fan.....It's kinda obnoxious. I had a problem with mine too. I forgot to plug it into the welder and fried my torch. They also didn't hook up th...

When I looked at the companies they partner with, Huntington Ingalls seemed to pay the best. $19/hr fresh outta school with 15 - 20 hours of overtime a week. Most of the stuff around Atlanta paid about $15/hr. The thing that impressed me the most about them is that they could set you up with a reall...

Size of your filler wire is gonna shape your bead profile. Wide filler equals wide beed, same for narrow. You just have to feed more filler into the puddle if you choose a smaller diameter fill wire. Speed of filler wire feed is going to determine your ripple pattern.

I worked in a sign shop several years back and the owner used illustrator with his plotter a lot. The only thing that he used more than illustrator was flexi sign. He just exported extended post script files (.eps) and it was go-cat-go. I never saw that plotter hiccup. It just didn't care. Of course...

If you try to start on the edge of thin aluminum it is always gonna peel back. You can weld up to the edge but you can't really start from the edge. Maybe some guys can, I can't. You won't ever see Jody do this in his videos either. Tacks are always placed a few millimeters from the edge. The reason...

You can see the anatomy of beziers very well if you zoom in on them in Photoshop. Seems like someone clever would be able to tell the program to skip every inside corner so that it doesn't cut like this:
I can imagine that would be taxing on a cutting tool.

As you move the puddle both halts kind puddle a little on each side. What? I can't decipher that statement. Stainless looks fine. Just watch that bottom edge and your dabbing will become much more consistent on that fillet weld. Puddle control on aluminum is from lack of heat. When it gets hot enou...

Gonna head to the ship yards when you get out? GA Trade School turned me down because I'm too much of a libertarian for their conservative values. So I took the $$$ that I was gonna spend on the school and put it into welding equipment. Looks lime they have a really good program there. Make sure tha...

So autocad produces real, rather than segmented curves?
Does that make that much difference to a stepper motor or just the software that controls it?

Looks like you're letting the arc hypnotize you a bit. Watch the puddle behind the arc and put in filler until the drop you're laying is the same width as the drop that you layed before it. Sweep youre eyes to the toes of the weld to ensure consistent tie in.....this is what will make or break you o...

+1 on the flex head torch. CK FlexLoc is even better.

No. Not by a long shot. Blender is a 3D modeleng and rendering suite that statred life as a character animation program. It is open source. It has some curve functionality, however crude. It's definitely nothing like autocad but can import and export autocad files (and many others) through built in ...

Coldman wrote:Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

...the ugly duckling's learned to dance...

I don't long arc anything. I suppose you're doing that to heat the rod up before running the bead. It causes spatter. I just touch the rod to the work piece for about 3 - 4 seconds then strike an arc. The entire rod will be at least a couple hundred degrees in those few seconds. This is a good techn...

Sorry Coldman,
Didn't mean to give you a geek check.

Looks like you might be long arcing your starts on the open butt plate and have a bit of inconsistent travel speed on the same. Try clamping your stinger a few inches lower on the rod or find a more comfortable position. I don't see any undercut or porosity. Looks good. Maybe add a little more metal...

Your graphics card won't handle blender's internal memory issues. Besides, I don't believe that memory is shared with system memory anyway. I'm not sure where the upper limit is in blender but you can have 16 gigs of system ram on tap but blender can only address a portion of that. Last I remember i...

Ten years ago, I bought a pressure pot sand blaster. It came with a big ass air dryer. It works extremely well. The slightest bit of dampness in this type of blaster clogs the hell out of the abrasive line. I looked up the dryer when I got the kit because it was so damn big. It's almost as big as my...

If you're using the knife tool, don't. That thing hacks the hell out of your mesh. Boolean modifier is also a no no with all but the most simplistic of meshes, plus you really need to match up vertices with it to avoid a shit ton of triangles. Triangles mostly SUCK in blender unless youre in a corne...

I've never had blender screw with any of my geometry. I've had to fight like hell to get the mesh to work with me on several occasions though. Subsurfed goemetry can be a bit of a bitch to work with sometimes. Especially on cars. Blender used to have an autosave option that would spit out a new inst...