TIG Welding and CNC Cutting

We’ve been busy the last few days TIG welding and CNC cutting up a variety of materials and a variety of thicknesses for some local fabricators.

Here’s some 1/2″ 44w steel plate that we cut, the internal features were cut with the corner lockout on so it allow for a slower cutting speed and less taper.  We’ve seen a huge improvement with holes!

While cutting all the half inch steel we had some room to nest a prototype rotation gauge.  This tool will be used with our tubing bender to ensure that our bends are on the correct plane or what angle the plane should be. This was designed in Solidworks to be perfectly balanced left-to-right as the center of gravity is located right in the center of the “V”.  It just needs a tapped hole at the bottom of the “J” for a 3/8″ bolt.

After all the heavy lifting we had a quick tweak to make with this exhaust that is destined for a Dodge Viper.  The hangers were off by 1/2″ (hence the pair of black “X’s”) and needed some adjustment.

Normally we’d just cut the brackets off and just create new ones, but the customer wanted a quick fix, so instead we strategically cut the hanger, moved them to where it should be and then welded in the cuts.  Made for really quick work and it provided a low cost fix.

Now onto a R32 Skyline anti-sway bar modification.  We already started in this photo by cutting three of the four mounting points.

Rear anti-sway bar mount removed.

Front anti-swaybar mount removed.

With the mounts removed the ends of the tubing are prepped.  Here the removed mount is having the orientation double checked with index mark on the tube.

Here are the new brackets cut off the CNC plasma table.  The new mount for the front allows for an additional mounting hole 0.875″ forward and behind the stock mounting location.  The rear allows for 1″ forward and behind.  This will allow the driver to adjust the anti-sway bar roll stiffness and alter the handling of the car.

Checking alignment.

Tacking.

Checking the alignment on the other end.

Getting ready to tack.

Beginning to weld them all up!

Post flow.  This is when the argon is purging after the arc has been extinguished.  This allows for the weld to cool down in an inert atmosphere as well as the tungsten and filler rod.  This all avoids contamination and yields very high quality welds.

This was a multi-pass weld so as to ensure that this joint would be strong and not fail in this high stress area.

All our jobs of the day ready to pick up and go!

UPDATE – 5-May-13

Our customer took those 1/2″ steel plates (first three photos in this post) and fabricated a hitch for a John Deere tractor.

 

Canadian Water Table

We’ve come up with a Canadian water table for our CNC plasma setup.  Sometimes we have a tough time getting Liters (or Gallons for our American friends) of water into our shop in the middle of winter.  So we tend to improvise.

What do we have a lot of in the dead of winter in Saskatchewan?  Snow!  So we try to make use of it when we can.

We’ve found the snow actually does a similar job as water in terms of trapping smoke during the plasma cutting process.  However when cutting thin material cool down before cutting reduces the amount of warpage when doing a lot of intricate cutting, especially on thin gauge stainless.  The only drawback with snow is that when it melts the smoke trapping effectiveness decreases rapidly.

We don’t do this very often but when we get a nice heavy snowfall it just takes a few shovelfuls to fill the plasma table.  Only in Canada…