Hey, another Blender using brother! I used to teach compositing and rendering on blenderartists a lot. You can find me on that site under this same user name. Just recently started throwing my 2 cents back into the ring over there. 3D printers will print from a .blend file? I thought it had to be fr...

Lincoln Viking with 4C lense technology. I was looking at hoods in my LWS with no intention of buying one. They offered to let me try it out in the back room. I left the shop $300 poorer but I am happy as hell with my hood. The clarity and color spectrum through this hood is unreal. The only color t...

The table that I'm using is an old transmission build table that my buddy has. He also had a sheet of 3/32" aluminum that he let me cut and put on top of the table to eliminate conductivity issues. If I have to weld anything that's gonna get really hot then I put a piece of 3/8" X 12"...

Exotic metals wrote:those pieces of copper are sitting in my kitchen mocking me at the moment

I feel them mocking us all!

There is a few of them around Atlanta but the only one I've ever bought from is Steel Mart. They charged me $10 per cut on 4" sch 80 pipe and $7.50 per cut on 4" X 3/8" flat bar. That didn't set too well with me but I couldn't get the stuff in my car without two cuts on each piece. Th...

I think that anyone who wants to have a "job" as opposed to working for their own self is crazy. I understand the security aspect of that approach but having a boss really sucks. Doing what you "want to do" as opposed to doing what you merely "have to do" is awesome! I ...

Nice. I put up some lettering at my buddy's auto repair shop advertising aluminum welding and took it back down two weeks later because I needed $$$ and had to take my tig machine to the pawn shop. Now he's pissed at me because he has a ton of people needing my service and neither one of us are maki...

It's gonna be a while before I can afford to do this but I'm planning on buying a giant plate of aluminum to make a welding table from. I got a price quote from http://www.metalsupermarkets.com for a piece of cast aluminum 0.75" X 48" X 96". The paltry sum quoted was a measly $2,211.2...

Good to have you here. It is a great site.
How did you get started in your business?

I don't think youre gonna be able to tig this thing up. You'll likely have to resort to oxy-acetylene and flux. Maybe I'm wrong but I just can't see this happening with a tig torch. I tried to tell a buddy of mine about this kind of stuff a few years back and he didn't believe me. So he asks my old ...

No one will want to sit on your stool if you mark your territory:

Hey Kym,
Prices and selection on welding supplies may suck in the land of Oz but the women are AWESOME!

Why would you use ac? You may need just a touch of ac like maybe 10% electrode positive if you were using aluminum bronze but not with silicone bronze. Besides, you can't weld as hot with ac as you can with dc and copper requires a ton of heat. Why would you weld it with oxygen free copper if you we...

If any of it is on the front of that bucket where it digs into the ground then you might wanna consider using hard facing rod. That stuff is ultra durable and made for tasks just like this. Just be aware that it will pop and ping and throw small pieces of metal at you for hours on end after you fini...

+1 on what ex said. I used to work on a roofing repair crew and we were up and down ladders all day. The guys laughed at me for the first few days. The more you do it the more accustomed you become to it. The fear never really goes away but you learn to put it aside after a while. Too much fear can ...

Hahaha! Not sure how that didn't go catastrophic on you instantaneously.
3/32" lanthanated handles 225A ac @ 30% cleaning in my #20 watercooled torch just fine for two minute runs. Never tried to push it any further.

2% lanthanated tungsten. Weldmonger doesn't sell torches any more, I know because I tried to get one there. Stubby gas lense kit if you don't have a #9 or #20 style torch. Those two torches are already stubby and don't need the kit. #9 torches suck anyway.

Yes. Pure argon.
Helium is useful if you wanna clean up your puddle on aluminum or if you need to go a lot hotter than your machine is capable of welding with pure argon. But argon is all you need.

This looks like a post for Rick_H. He helped me to get my first good looking stainless weld on super thin 16 gauge SS. He has a ton of tricks in his bag.

Go get yourself some business cards made up and go pass them out to all the local auto repair shops. Tell all your friends to introduce them to any business owners they know who may need your kind of services. You'll have side work rolling your way in no time. Even after you find another job it prob...

You'll also probably want to have a torch that has a gas valve on it:

http://www.ckworldwide.com/150-amps-ckc150.html

I would like to see a weld like that one get cut and etched because the high crown on it makes it look extremely cold to me. The toes really look like they only wet in on the right side where the soot is.

Can you post a picture of what you mean by a pretty aluminum MIG weld? I used to have a few nice photos in my phone because a former buddy was becoming quite an artist with a spool gun while building gates. Don't have em anymore. October of last year I was driving a flatbed semi and picking up a lo...

But it will never look pretty. Man, I've seen some very pretty aluminum mig welds. The problem with pretty aluminum mig is that it's almost always cold. Lack of fusion is a very bad thing. I've seen several of those pretty welds break along their toes for LOF. I don't really care what anyone says a...

Not really. It runs fine on many inverter machines as long as the machine was designed to run it. These machines typically have a port labeled 6010 just for this purpose.