Bells & Whistles v. Skill

Now that I’m an expert welder who can occasionally create a viable stick bead, I am clearly too high and mighty for my portable Harbor Freight welding table.

I probably paid around $50 for the table. It’s the same one other companies sell for…more. I’m not looking it up to see how much they charge. It’s a fairly thick piece of slotted sheet steel on a folding table with plastic feet that come off over and over until you get mad and put Liquid Nails in them.

Are you a beginning welder? Buy the Harbor Freight table. It works. The price is great, too. It’s portable, unlike a real welding table. It’s a great product. You can’t do better on your own for the price. It will be useful even after you get a big table, because you may want the portability. But know that you will want something better eventually.

The table supposedly supports an ungodly amount of weight. The ads say that, anyway. I would not trust it beyond maybe 60 pounds. The slope of the table is adjustable, and the adjustments use clamps that are basically just screws with plastic handles. My table is not level at the moment, even though I set it up in the level position and tightened the clamps, and I have never put anything heavy on it. It has moved, and it would probably move even more if I put a big weight on it.

What I’m saying is that it’s not ideal for heavy work.

The top is also small. It’s only 30″ long. I feel like you really need two feet by 4 feet, or 3 feet square, minimum, to have any kind of versatility.

Is the top flat? No. It can twist. The clamp on one side can be adjusted differently from the one on the other, so the slope will be different at each ends, and that means twist. You can get it flat enough to do most things, but it’s not exactly a reference surface.

It’s a very nice portable table. I mean truly portable. I’m sure there are other “portable” tables out there that weigh 300 pounds. This one, you can pick up with one hand, and it’s collapsible. It’s not a substitute for a real table.

Once you decide to get a real table, you have more horrible decisions in front of you.

You can get a table with no holes in it. A lot of people do this. Lots and lots. Solid tables are good because they’re awfully easy to make. You just put a slab of steel or cast iron on legs.

You can get a table with holes or slats. Holes and slats are good because they allow you to attach bolts and clamps all over the place. This is extremely helpful when you’re making a complex project, which I may never do. They make tables more expensive (or harder to make for yourself), however, and if you have slats, things will fall through them all the time. Some of those things will be globs of molten metal, and this can be a problem.

You can get a really flat table or just accept relatively flat. Flatness costs money. You may have to pay for grinding. If you flatten it yourself, you may have to add a complicated leveling system, or you may have to machine one piece of the top at a time.

My head hurts just from writing this.

Some guy on a forum (I always read forums) says a big industrial company had one huge fab table, and it was solid. He said they ground it with angle grinders once in a while to maintain the surface. That makes it sound like a solid table is okay, but he didn’t say anything about the aggravation they endured, trying to fasten things down for welding.

I am thinking I may make my own table. It seems to me that a man with a milling machine ought to be able to take 6 slabs of steel, mill them flat, drill a few holes, and attach them to a frame. I don’t see what the problem is.

Why do you need a flat table? To make things line up correctly. I welded an arbor press stand on my garage floor, and I wish I hadn’t. The floor was so crooked (ignoring the quality of my welding) that the stand came out higher on one side than the other. You need to line things up precisely when you weld, and it’s best to clamp them to discourage warping.

Here’s the obvious question: how do you make a table, which is your principle tool for keeping work flat and square, without a table?

There are some tools for that, and they are endorsed by some other guy on a forum, so they must work.

A company called Fireball Tool (I think it’s just one guy who printed up T-shirts) makes heavy welding squares from cast iron and cast aluminum. You clamp your stuff to them, and they hold it straight. They have little tabs on them, projecting out from the square surfaces, and you can rest your work on them so the work is square and also in a plane.

If you don’t have a flat table, you can use these squares to hold the parts of your table frame while you weld them together. This will give you a square, straight frame to put your table on.

I looked around, trying to find something cheaper, and the alternatives were not good. The worst one was a jig made from scrap…on a table which wasn’t flat. It would make things square, but not flat.

A lot of the competing products I looked at were in the same expense ballpark as the Fireball squares, so I quit surfing and ordered two. I chose aluminum, not cast iron. A lot of guys are in love with cast iron. That’s because they’ve never paid good money for a cast iron item and then dropped it on a concrete floor. I’m not spending over 100 bucks on a square just so I can destroy it the day I get it.

Both aluminum and cast iron shed welding spatter well, but aluminum can’t shatter. If I drop an aluminum square and bend part of it, I can machine the problem out. I may even be able to replace missing metal with weld. If I break cast iron, school’s out. Time to buy another one or just live with one that is no longer quite right.

Aluminum also weighs a lot less.

Will I use the squares to make a table? I do not know. I can get a nice manufactured table for around a grand, and I’ll have a warranty and much less work to do. It’s a lot of money, but it would be the headache-free path, and it would probably be the last table I would ever want. If I make my own table, it will be a lot more work, and it won’t be quite as versatile, but I’ll save a ton of cash.