Finger Brake Kit Fails to Intimidate

Chalk up another good day.

My finger brake kit from Swag Offroad arrived in the mail yesterday. I didn’t know, because I didn’t check the mail until today. Obviously, once I saw it, I had to start putting it together.

To reiterate, this is a hydraulic press accessory that will let you make bent metal parts from very thick steel.

The box was really heavy. I would say 40 pounds. Who cares? I’m the guy with the $39 Harbor Freight tool cart. I drove the box from my mailbox to the garage, and then I put it in the cart and wheeled it to the workshop. I love that cart.

I didn’t get to work on the kit right away because I had to get in some stick welding practice. I have had three sessions so far, I believe. The first one was disastrous. The second was much better. The third was better still. I expect to be fully capable of nice-looking simple welds in a week.

The kit requires welding. In order to get it in a long flat rate box, Swag cuts a couple of parts off of it, and there are other parts that probably would not fit in the box if they were welded on. You can buy the kit fully assembled for $125 more, which is not unreasonable, but I wanted to start using tools instead of just buying them, so I didn’t go that route.

I didn’t do a whole lot today. The first task is to push two solid steel guide bars into a couple of holes on one of the kit’s major parts. When the upper “jaw” of the press moves up and down, it has to have something to locate it, and that’s what the bars do. It rides on the bars.

The bars fit in two tubes on the ends of the jaw. Obviously, everything has to be parallel, or the tool won’t work well.

The instructions say to use a hammer or press to cram the rods halfway into the part, and then they say to use a small square to make sure the rods are square to the part.

That’s really all they say. If you’re no good with tools, that’s the end of the line for you.

Obviously, I used the hydraulic press. Why would you use a hammer when you’re making an accessory for your press?

I surprised myself with my ability to deal with the challenge. I put two pieces of tape around the ends of the rods to indicate half the thickness of the part they would be pressed into. That allowed me to see how far the rods were going in without removing the whole mess from the press over and over to check. I got their depths within 10 thousandths of each other, which I was able to measure because I have dial calipers.

Using a square to align the rods seemed impossible, but I thought it over and came up with an answer. I have a set of machinist’s squares. I selected one. I had no problem squaring the rods along one axis. I just rested the square’s base in the big part to the the big part’s axis, and then I whopped the rods with a rawhide hammer until they were perpendicular to the part, within a few thousandths. Then I got out a thick machinists’ parallel and rested it on top of the part. This gave me a surface wide enough to rest the square on to check alignment along the other axis. Before long, I was done. Not only did I do okay; I may end up with the most perfectly aligned finger press brake lower jaw in the world.

The accuracy of the alignment is limited by the uniformity of the parts, but I got it about as close as a human being could.

I saw some guy complaining about how the tool doesn’t work because the rods aren’t aligned. That tells me there are people out there who are worse at this than I am. A good machinist, or even a bad one, should be able to get these parts aligned, and I have enough experience to know how to do it.

I’m doing pretty well for a white-collar guy.

Next time, I have to start welding. That means MIG. I’m not going to gouge up a nice new tool trying to weld it with stick. I’ll have to spend a little time practicing with the MIG, to make sure I don’t blow it when I weld the parts.

This is the nice thing about working with tools. You struggle for a long time, but eventually you reach a point where you just know how to do things, and you already have the tools you need. You will probably develop a collection of scrap material, so much of the time, you’ll even have the stuff you need to make parts.

I’ve probably known about the Swag Offroad kit since it was introduced, but the welding scared me off. Not any more.

I think this will work out great, and when I’m done, I should actually be able to improve the finger brake. When I get my mill running, I can make some modifications.

I want my first project to be a mobile base for the band saw. I already have it sitting on one, and it’s very nice, but I think I can do much better.