Sometimes You Just Want to BUY Something

The person who laid out this property situated my shop so the doors on each end face east and west. Was this incredibly stupid or a masterstroke?

As it is, the burning sun roasts the east side of the shop in the morning and the west side of the shop until about 8 p.m. in the summer. Unpleasant if you’re working on the west side, which I frequently am. If the shop were situated differently, the sun would hit both sides of the shop pretty much all the time, but it would hit them from different directions as the day passed, and it would be possible to plant shade trees close to it to make the afternoons and evenings less miserable.

I guess the way it is is okay.

Today I removed the ears from my tractor bucket, and I quit when the real roasting started.

I put a quick attach adaptor on the tractor’s loader, and I also wanted a bucket that would fit it, but the buckets are backed up several months. That is no good, so I had to order a huge, heavy mount plate in order to modify the bucket myself. To make the plate fit, the ears have to be totally gone, ground flat. They were (were) welded in place on 4 sides, so they were not made with the intention of assisting people who wanted to remove them in a hurry.

I figured I would use my gas welding outfit with a propane cutting tip. A couple of years back, I bought a very serious Victor acetylene outfit and fixed it up so it worked with propane. The acetylene regulator will work fine with propane, and I have the acetylene stuff in case I ever decide to try gas welding.

Until today, I had never used the outfit for anything but heating. I heated the 1/2″-thick ears on my 3-point subsoiler because they were bent from pulling stumps and needed to be straightened. Worked fine, but it didn’t teach me anything about propane cutting.

I have a plasma cutter, but I thought it would be too hard to get it into the corners on the bucket, so two days ago, I decided to become a propane cutting expert. It did not go well.

First of all, my bucket appears to be 1/4″ thick, and my cutting tips are the wrong size. I have size 1 tips. I should have 0 or 00. Second, I don’t know what I’m doing.

By watching a few videos and asking questions on the web, I got to the point where I could sort of cut steel, and today I gave it a shot. I was able to cut through the ears, but it was a pain. The torch kept going out, and the metal took forever to yield. I decided to try plasma, which turned out to better suited to the job than I had thought.

I tried to cut sideways into the welds holding the ears on so the jet would not cut into the bucket itself. The main problem I had was that I blew molten metal under the ears where it solidified into bad welds. I also had problems with the jet dying for no clear reason. I think the terrible ground clamp that came with my Hypertherm plasma cutter was letting me down.

I cut and recut and recut. I finally managed to remove the parts of the ears that were perpendicular to the bucket’s surface, but the parts that lay flat against it were stuck. I got out the big Metabo grinder and some Walter Zip Disks and cut the metal loose except for the parts that sat directly on welds. Those parts, I am slowly removing with the Metabo and a smaller grinder equipped with a 40-grit Walter flap wheel.

Walter makes really excellent abrasives. I have learned to avoid the cheap stuff. Cheap disks do a much poorer job and give out quicker.

I have bought a second Harbor Freight rolling tool chest for conversion into a welding cart, and it is sitting near the tractor bucket. This is why the box the chest came in caught fire today.

I was shooting gobs of molten steel all over the place, and one flew into the base of the box, causing it to go up like a match. I was very impressed at how fast it started to burn. My hair didn’t burn nearly that well the many times I set it on fire today.

My friend Mike is staying with me, and he had moved the shop’s front garden hose to the back for watering plants, so I thought it was best to grab my wall-mounted extinguisher and see if it worked. It worked just fine, leaving nasty yellow powder everywhere. I put it on the shop floor so it would be convenient in case I needed it again, and then when I sat down on my Homer bucket to continue cutting, I also sat on the extinguisher handle, shooting more powder on the floor.

After a lot of struggling, I got both ears off the bucket, and now I just have a few strips of leftover metal to grind flat.

In retrospect, I see I should have used the plasma cutter to trace around the bottoms of the ears, cutting through the bucket and removing them in 20 minutes instead of what will end up being two days. I could then have welded a couple of new pieces of plate in the holes in the bucket, and everything would have been dandy. Would the plate have been as strong as the original steel? I assume so, but it doesn’t matter, because the mount plate is very thick and will be welded over the areas where the ears went, making those areas very strong even with ear-sized rectangular holes in them, let alone new steel plate.

Oh, well.

When you fabricate, you have to be confident, or you will never finish a job. You have to be willing to say things like, “I am going to cut this whole part off and put something else in later, because it is wasting my time.” Steel is not like wood. Once you cut wood out, it’s just plain gone. When you cut steel out, you can put more steel in and make your project as good or better than it was before you started. You have to get used to welding and cutting without fear.

When I decided to go with plasma, I checked to see if there were longer tips for getting into tight places. There are. Hypertherm makes them. Guess whose cutter they don’t fit.

I think I got my cutter in 2007. Not sure. It was some kind of anniversary for Hypertherm, because the cutter was painted in limited-edition gold. In 2008, they quit making it. Now they have completely different torches.

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll get an upgraded torch. That can’t cost much.”

No, it doesn’t cost much. Unless $500 is much.

I looked the price up, and I could not believe it. I know American companies charge more for stuff, but come on. It’s a hose, a couple of wires, and a plastic pistol grip.

Hypertherm no longer makes the torch that came with my machine, so if I drop mine, it’s $500 or no plasma cutting.

My cutter is a Powermax600, which seemed like a big stretch for me when I bought it. It’s a 40-amp cutter, and that figure is the current it puts into the work. I think I paid around $1600, and that hurt.

I can buy an Everlast 60-amp cutter for $1000. Yes, it’s Chinese, but it’s good enough for many professionals. An Everlast would have an inverter, so it would suck less current and weigh a lot less for what it does. It’s only 6 pounds heavier than my machine and produces 60% more current. The duty cycle is lower, but who runs a plasma cutter 100% of the time?

Hypertherm wants $500 for a torch, and they want $2000 (street price) for the cutter that fills the slot mine used to. The new one is 16 pounds lighter, probably because inverters replaced transformers about 10 seconds after I clicked “Submit Order” to buy my obsolete machine.

I looked into Everlast because I was mad at Hypertherm for charging $500 for a torch, and because I thought maybe Everlast or some other Chinese product would work with extended tips. I have not found any evidence they work with extended tips, so I guess there is no reason to flip out and buy one.

Anyway, I should just learn to use the propane cutter. I have smaller tips on the way.

Once the tractor bucket is modified and painted, which should be Monday or Tuesday, I can build the new welding cart and make a small modification to the one I already built. Then I can get rid of my old Eastwood welding cart and put all my welding stuff into my two Harbor Freight chest/carts.

I should be able to get the cart made in a couple of days because I have all the parts this time. The mod on the old one will be somewhat taxing because I have to take it apart and take all the tools out of it before I can do anything.

Once the carts are done, I jump into fabricating a fork attachment for my tractor, so I will probably have to get a second mount plate. I’m hoping I can use part of the plate I already have. Of course, I would have to cut it somehow…

Now I know why Mrs. Douglas wanted to stay in New York when her husband moved to Hooterville.