Are You Really a Maker if You Buy Stuff?

I am still overthinking the business of procuring a new welding table.

To re-cover old ground, I thought I might buy a Fabblock table, which is a box made from 1/4″ plate, supported by transverse ribs welded to it on the underside. Then I thought maybe I should buy an Arc Flat table, which would be two or more cast iron boxes that could be bolted together side by side. Then I considered making my own table from a sheet of plate. After that, I thought maybe I should buy strips of plate, mill them flat, and bolt them to a table side by side with 2″ gaps between them.

I would like to have a fairly flat table. My current table has a 1/16″ crown in the middle, which means it’s pretty flat. I don’t want anything wavier than that. The biggest challenge in welding is putting things together square and flat, and the flatter your table is, the easier it will be.

I was getting to the point where buying strips of plate seemed like the way to go. Then I saw another sales pitch. It came from Texas Metal Works, a company that makes box-style steel tables.

TMW, as I will call it out of laziness, has a page where they defend their tables. One of the problems with choosing a table is the fact that a lot of the most detailed information comes from people who are trying to sell you things. It makes the information hard to trust. You have to dig around and try to determine how sound it is. Anyway, TMW’s page attempts to debunk a video made by a company called Fireball Tools.

Fireball makes inventive tools, including cast iron panels you can attach to a frame to create your own table. You can’t make tables of arbitrary size, because the panels are 12″ by 24″. A panel costs $125, and it requires a little machining, which I can do easily. If I made a 24″ by 54″ table, which is as close as I could come using Fireball products, the panels alone would run me $650, so figure $800 for a table which would be smaller than I want.

Fireball criticized Fabblocks. A standard Fabblock is made from 1/4″ steel. You can get thicker tables, but 1/4″ is where they start. TMW makes a table which is nearly the same thing, so when Fireball criticized Fabblocks, TMW had a dog in the fight.

Jason Marburger, the Fireball Tool guy, took a Fabblock and stuck a clamp into one of its fixture holes. Then he put about 1,000 pounds of force on it. When he was done, the hole had a burr around the edge. The clamp had a round post that went through the hole, and it worked by catching on the hole as pressure was applied. This only works because holes allow round rods to lean slightly. If they stood straight in the holes, they would slide right out. Because they lean over, there is friction.

I thought the Fireball video showed that 1/4″ steel was a bad idea, but TMW makes some good points.

1. No one in his right mind puts 1,000 pounds of force on a welding clamp. I agree with this point. If you have to put that much force on a clamp, something is wrong, and when you weld your joint, it will have an internal stress trying to open it, just as strong as the force you had to apply to close it.

2. Some welding accessories are made to work with 1/4″ steel, and if you make it thicker, you can get compatibility issues.

3. TMW is only too happy to make thicker tables on request, and they make more money from them, but they advise people to go with thinner tops instead.

4. TMW makes welding tables in a commercial environment, they can make new ones for very little, and they use their own 1/4″ tables to make the ones they sell.

TMW put up photos of one of their big tables hanging from two clamps, and they showed that the damage to the holes was so slight, they couldn’t be sure the clamps did it.

So we have two companies duking it out. Both make expensive products, but only TMW advises you to buy cheaper ones.

TMW says you can’t really get extreme, lasting flatness without spending several times as much money. Other companies try to make it sound like their lower-tier tables are extremely flat. For example, they’ll say the plates are cut on laser machines that have tolerances of a few thousandths or ten-thousandths of an inch over long distances, but they don’t point out that the tolerance of a machine isn’t the tolerance of a product it makes. Once the cut plate comes off the machine, things can happen to it in the assembly process.

Here’s a quotation:

All providers cut parts for welding tables on industrial CNC lasers, which are built to very tight tolerances. For example, a Baileigh Fiber Laser quotes .0004? per foot of repeatability, and ~.005? minimum cutting width. And while these numbers are impressive, they have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of fabrication of a finished product coming off them! They are products on their own.

Of course, that passage comes from a page in which TMW is comparing its own table to a truly flat one costing much more, so caveat emptor.

Making a table would validate my existence as a welder/fabricator. A lot of welders deride people who buy tables. On the other hand, zillions of professionals buy tables, so it’s probably more accurate to say that a real professional buys instead of building.

I figure I can make a decent table for under $800, whereas an assembled 5′ by 2.5′ TMW table could be sitting in my driveway next week for $1700. A 5′ by 2′ Fabblock kit, unassembled, would run $1250.

To make things more complicated, a guy just told me flat tables don’t stay flat once you use them. Does he know what he’s talking about? I don’t know. He’s a random guy on a forum. For all I know, his metal-bonding experience consists of several adventures with a Radio Shack soldering iron.

At least I’ve come to a tentative decision regarding table size. I was thinking of 3′ by 4′, but now I’m thinking 2.5′ by 5′. The square footage is nearly the same, but I would get an extra foot of length, and I think that would be much more useful than the 6 inches of width I would lose.

All this cogitation is based on the premise that the rapture isn’t coming this year. Still not sure what to think about that. I have never “predicted” that it would, but I keep having strong impressions that it will, and then there were the two Christmas-related rapture dreams I had. Also, other people have had rapture dreams involving Christmas. In my dreams, I found myself singing “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” and a lady who heard about these dreams said she had found herself singing that song in her dreams, too, and that it made sense to her after reading about my experiences.

If the rapture is upon us, there is no point in buying or building a welding table. On the other hand, if I place an order or start working on a table, and the rapture comes, my trying to get a new table won’t cause any problems.

When it comes to expensive tools, you need experience in order to know what to buy, but if you never buy anything, you aren’t likely to get experience. I guess I should make a decision and jump in. It looks like a maximum of around $900 is at stake, since I have to spend around $800 no matter what, and an assembled factory table would run around $1700.