I Welded Again
May 9th, 2009I am the Go-to Tool Guy
You’ll all be glad to know that I actually did something with my tools today. Val Prieto is getting ready for Miami’s Cuba Nostalgia convention, and he had a couple of broken welds on the steel frames he uses to make his booth. He brought them over, and he ground the crud off, and I welded the broken tabs back on.
His dad is a welder. He says he’s going to make fun of my welds. But Val is the one who ground them down after I was done, and let’s be honest. There is no such thing as bad welding. There is only bad grinding.
I’m still trying to get the lathe up and running. The new VFD will be here Monday, I guess. The new motor went back to UPS because of the broken conduit box. I can’t help thinking UPS might do better if they trained employees to stop throwing things. They really do that. The UPS guy in my neighborhood is very friendly, and I even showed him my Saiga 12 the other day, but from the sound the motor made when he delivered it, I would guess that he dropped it from waist height.
I remember ordering a hundred-plus-dollar Physics text (Morse & Feshbach) and eagerly waiting for it to arrive. On the day it came, I saw the UPS guy at my apartment complex dropping a box and then kicking it accidentally when he tried to pick it up. Naturally, my book was inside it. I don’t know how it survived.
I have to have a 4-jaw chuck. I don’t want to spend my life trying to find ways to cram stuff into a 3-jaw job. A guy on Ebay has an 8″ Skinner off an old South Bend, and the price is not bad. I saw some people on Practical Machinist claiming these chucks weren’t heavy-duty, because they’re hollow in back. I don’t know how much that matters. I don’t want to blow $250 on a piece of junk I’ll have to replace.
Chinese chucks cost the same amount of money, because you have to add back plates, and the back plate cost will get you up to $250, easily.
The Ebay guy also has a nice faceplate, but he’s selling it with a backplate I don’t want. Maybe I can get him to break them up. All of these items are new but old. They haven’t been used; they’ve been moldering in cabinets.
The milling machine search is going poorly. A dealer in Connecticut has some great-looking machines at what appear to be very good prices, but he is not answering my emails, so I’m about to give up on him. Maybe a spam filter is blocking me. A local outfit has a couple of machines for between $3000 and $4000, with DROs installed, but I’d have to go inspect them, and I have been fairly busy. Then there’s the restorer in Massachusetts who has great machines at very good prices. Problem: $1500 to ship. I’m so fed up I’m almost ready to scour the planet for cheaper shipping and just tell this guy to send me a machine. If I could get it down $500, I’d be willing to surrender.
I saw a neat idea for lathe milling. Some guy put an angle plate on his carriage and screwed his compound to it vertically. Then he added a small screwless vise mounted to the compound. Pretty slick, but by the time you get done, you’re out over a hundred bucks, and you can’t do very much milling.
I wonder if I could find a way to mount my tool post holder base on the compound so I could mill it. It’s too big. The work is very simple. Four straight cuts with an end mill would do it.
Someone suggested I take the old VFD apart and see if there is an obvious problem I can fix. It’s impossible to take apart, or so it seems. But I’m trying. It would be nice if I had a multimeter that worked, instead of a defective Fluke. I’ll never buy a Fluke meter again. Chinese stuff can’t be any worse, and it costs half as much.
Sooner or later I’ll machine something. Oh yes. It shall happen.
May 9th, 2009 at 5:22 PM
Just because you can make metal glow and sometimes make metal stick, does not mean you are a welder. About 20 years ago, I took an adult ed welding night class at my local JC. I learned a lot about welding, and the total cost was $35. One thing I learned is that it is easy to have a big glob of glass (flux residue) covering a thin bubble of steel that is not in fact a deep weld.
John Fluke makes the best meters out there. If your meter does not work, it is either bad test leads, you blew the fuse on the input that prevented you from smoking the internals when trying to do something smart like testing how much current Florida Power & Light can deliver to your house, or your 9v battery is dead. Most likely you have a loose screw between the chair-back and the display.
May 9th, 2009 at 5:41 PM
Where I work we call the company with the brown trucks “OOPS”.
It’s common knowledge you could lock one of their package handlers in a sealed room with two bowling balls and come back later to find one bowling ball broken and the the other one missing.
May 9th, 2009 at 7:29 PM
I’d guess that if you fried the VFD very seriously at all, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to fix it. For one thing, the components tend to be so tiny that they’re impossible for us mere mortals to work with. And, it’s likely that even if you managed to get it working, it would be likely to fail again due to some other component being weakened.
Save your time & money trying to do milling on the lathe and put it towards a mill.
Here’s another source for machinery: Yoder Machinery Sales, 1-800-622-4463. One friend bought a B’Port from him that was well-used, but is now in service after replacing spindle bearings and other more-minor repairs. Another bought a Clausing lathe from him. He might have a chuck for your lathe, with a backplate already mounted. He’s close enough (15 miles or so) that I’d be willing to look at something you’re considering buying to offer my half-assed opinion. I don’t claim to be an expert, but it’s probably better than trusting a simple phone description. My friends didn’t feel taken by the guy anyway, he seems straight-up.
Your UPS story is familiar. I once gave an old (to me) hard drive to a friend in Texas. He saw the UPS guy drop it just as you observed. Long story short, UPS paid me $250.00 for the drive.
May 9th, 2009 at 8:07 PM
Mike, I don’t know what you’re so grumpy about, but I will respond as nicely as I can.
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Your singular admiration for Mr. Fluke notwithstanding, it turns out the meter has a really stupid design flaw. When the battery gets low, instead of telling you what’s going on, the meter gives double voltage readings as its way of begging to be changed. You would think a low-battery indicator would be built in, if only to keep Mr. Fluke from being sued by people who rely on his products, but I guess you can’t expect that kind of advanced technology from a company that builds…electric multimeters. A new 9V battery has fixed the problem.
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That’s assuming I’m right, and that the meter isn’t a complete piece of crap which will continue giving funky readings even with a full charge. Maybe it is a piece of crap. Mr. Fluke seems to think so, since he gave it a short warranty and refuses to stand behind it. And his genius tech was not aware that this might be the problem, because if he had been, he would have told me so. I guess the really smart employees are hard at work, designing overly expensive meters without low-battery indicators.
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Inferior companies foolishly build meters which open with the flick of a finger, so the batteries can be checked and replaced easily. I congratulate Mr. Fluke on using tightly-seated pot-metal screws driven deeply into easily stripped plastic. Now that I know how sensitive the product is to bad batteries, I expect to enjoy removing and replacing those screws many times, always with considerable worry about destroying the screws or the case.
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I’m not the one who concluded it was screwed up. That came straight from the Fluke technician. As for me screwing it up by trying to use it, that sort of suggests that expensive meters are not a good idea. If they blow up when you use them as directed, they at least ought to be cheap.
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Thanks for the useful and perceptive critique of my welding skills. And here I thought I was ready to open my own school. I do the best I can with the educational materials that are available to me. The only classes in my area, last time I checked, were intensive vocational courses lasting several semesters. I know it sounds crazy, given the many lives that depend on my welds, but I decided not to go that route. I will call Val and tell him to destroy the frames so they don’t hurt anyone. I am sure he would not want to use anything that didn’t meet AWS standards.
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It’s really not that complicated. The only factors are voltage, wire feed, gas flow, and practice. It’s pretty clear which one is causing my problems, and my welds are good enough for my needs. Val needed a favor, and no one else was available. Maybe you can excuse me for trying to help.
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GMAW doesn’t use flux. For $35, they should have told you that.
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More information: I checked the instructions for Ideal’s 61-314 multimeter, which I can buy for $45, and it has a low battery indicator, plus instructions to change the battery as soon as it lights up. Toolup currently sells my Fluke 16 for $169.
May 9th, 2009 at 8:17 PM
Jim, I really appreciate that offer. They have some nice machines on their site.
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I think you’re right about the lathe milling, unless I found the parts for next to nothing. But I might be able to fix that tool post part by rigging something up.
May 10th, 2009 at 3:43 AM
I bought an tiny little Oxy MaPP torch this weekend at the HD and scared myself in my Basement shop trying to braze some stuff together for a hobby project.
I wish I could pay another $35 and take a class and keep my eyebrows.
May 10th, 2009 at 6:57 AM
Boy, Steve. The meds must be helping. That was an extremely reserved (and erudite) reply to “Mike”.
May 10th, 2009 at 9:21 AM
I don’t know, Ed. Maybe I should go ahead and buy a few more Flukes, just to be on the safe side. In any case, Mike motivated me to take another look at that stupid meter, and that’s why it’s working now, so I can’t really complain.
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It amazes me that a company which is known far and wide for building circuits that test voltage would be too backward to put a low-battery indicator on a multimeter. I mean, the indicator itself is a voltage meter. Wouldn’t you think Fluke would be able to build it?
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I wonder if Fluke is owned by GM.
May 11th, 2009 at 7:43 AM
Here I was going to be nice and helpful, and you had to go and insult GM again.
I wonder if Lileks has archives of his Honda problem. He can’t take his element through a carwash without toasting something, and has received lousy service. But because japanese poo doesn’t stink, they don’t get a bad rap. Apple and Honda should mate – oh they did; that’s how we got our current president.
As for Fluke – expertitis. Acttually, the GM allusion is apt if you mean GM circa 1973. Sounds like they’re too used to being dominant. “Low battery indicator? Everyone knows that when you get a double reading it’s a low battery.” Lame. But you will probably not need to buy another meter. From what I’ve seen, they’re solid despite annoyances.
As for Mike – Count ten and Pray. His answer wasn’t even worth a response.
You can apply that to me too, if you like.
May 11th, 2009 at 8:24 AM
I have to admit it; when you cite the Element, you are drawing blood. It’s the Pontiac Aztek of Hondas. The other day I was driving behind an Element, and I realized that if I had to build a car from scratch in 30 days, it would look more like an Element than any other production vehicle.
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Let’s not pile on Mike. Maybe he was tired. It’s just barely conceivable that I might say something crabby, myself, at some point during my life.
May 12th, 2009 at 7:51 AM
A guy at church totalled an Aztek; it was unrecognizable, but didn’t look any worse.
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The element does have a few things going for it. For example, the floors aren’t crud-catching carpet but some sort of rubber. Why did consumers ever demand carpeted interiors? Why did car designers living in a state that is covered in muddy salty slush 4 months of the year acede to this demand?
May 12th, 2009 at 8:41 AM
There is no such thing as bad welding. There is only bad grinding.
Ahem…