Today was a pain in the . . . everything.

Today, my TIG welder decided to throw a temper tantrum. I'm thinking that something might have gotten knocked around when I moved it to the new shop. I've eliminated just about everything else and have finally gotten some decent beads.

First order of business, the sign holder frames:

Hmmm . . . I wonder if the floor is level?

Yeah . . . Of course not. heh

Solution:

Using the plate and flat-face clamps keeps the pieces generally in place. Also, I am welding the sides as per the customer's request so he can fit poles or fasten attention getting things to the sides of the sign holder. Normally, I don't leave ends open.

First one welded together:

I got the second one welded up then moved on to making sure all the pieces I have fit together correctly:

I took a break and wanted to figure out WTF was going on with my welder. For some reason, I was getting a LOT of crud in the welds even after sanding, acetone, wire brushing with a stainless steel wire brush only used for aluminum and then acetone AGAIN. I checked my ground connections, torch connections, gas lines, adjusted gas pressures, played with the frequency and balance, found this:

moved up to 1/8" tungsten (thought I am not a fan of the type I am using for aluminum, but it works decently enough it seems) and after all that, I FINALLY started to get something resembling decent:

I got a bit hot on this joint:

The sign frame is going to get welded into the slot formed between the upright angles and the tab welded to the end of the box:

First on the right, last on the left:

Much better color on the last one, showing much improved weld quality:

Funky 1/8" tungsten:

 Odd color, but a really nice ball at 125A dialed in, so it isn't all bad. 

Progress on Pete's Manifold

After a super busy day, I got in some more welding. I am starting to get the hang of welding this thick stuff. I have resolved that I need to get some slightly thicker filler metal as the thin stuff I have now is melting back too fast for me to keep up a good rhythm. I'm still improving and will keep it up!

I start out with cleaning. I used acetone to get the residue from the sticky foil tape off the merge pipe then sanded it with sandpaper on the outside and a cartridge roll on the inside. The inside needs to be cleaned, too!

I was tying to make my life easy but clamping this in my vise:

But I realized I really didn't want to try grounding the whole thing through precision machined jaws. I also totally forgot that the el needed to be cleaned up, too!

After I took it apart and cleaned up the 90* el, I changed game plans and got my (still less than ideal) purge setup installed and let the gas flow!

Here's a close up of the clean up:

I tacked the pieces together, checked fitment. Again. And again.  And then I got down to welding!

I'm starting to get the hang of it:

When I was wrapping around the sides, I ran into some undercut:

 I will fix that for sure, but after I tack the other side together. I was starting to scorch the blue tape holding the joints together on the other side. I'd rather they not come apart just yet. LOL!

More undercut to be fixed:

After the other leg is tacked up, I'll finish welding that section together.

Why do you backpurge? To get a clean inside joint, like this:

No, it isn't fully penetrated, but there is no "sugaring" of the backside which is basically oxygen contamination that will eat away at the stainless from the inside out, especially when exposed to very high temperatures found in it's intended application! 

Pete's Twin Scroll Manifold Progress

Today was a busy day. It might not look like I got a whole lot done, but, when you are working with a tough material (Stainless Steel is a heck of a lot tougher to work with, and tough to work with correctly) in a new format (I've never worked with schedule 40 bends and pipe before), you have to go slow and take your time to get things to fit well in a manner that will flow well, especially when it comes to turbo setups.

Enough whining! On to pics!

The last time we saw stuff for Pete's manifold, I had made a few important cuts. Here's a refresher pic:

I couldn't take a lot of in process pics, but this is what I ended up with after way too long a time getting these two pieces to fit together in a decent low angle merge:

As you can see from the light leak, it isn't a perfect fit:

But looking at it from the important side (the inside):

 After a bit of cleanup, both legs are going to flow very, very nicely!

Once I got the pieces fitted up decently, it was time to clean everything up in preparation for welding. I use my hanging grinder (click HERE for more info on which grinder I use) and a roll cartridge that was fresh and never used on anything else. Here are the results:

A closeup of the texture left:

Then it is time for some really deep cleaning:

Use gloves!

Acetone is really nasty for your body. It absorbs into your skin and is not a good thing to force your body to deal with. Also, the oils from your skin can contaminate the weld and lead to rusting. No, that is NOT an exaggeration. Some people's skin oils and salts can leave rusty fingerprints on stainless.  It isn't a fun thing to see on your otherwise shiny stainless parts. LOL!

To wipe everything down you can use clean rags or paper towels, but I don't have rags, so I just use:

Remo (a guy I know) is going to kill me for not having a diffuser on my purge hose . . . but I haven't made one yet. LOL!

This turned out to be a bad idea. LOL! The hose started melting once I got to welding.

You can't block off all the piece. You need a place for the air (and specifically Oxygen) to escape as the argon fills the pipe. So, make sure you leave some place for it to come out at the very top of your workpiece!

I really need to make a "third hand." Check out this video by Jody at weldingtipsandtrick.com did to show his improved "third hand:"

The back side is taped:

I tacked it on one side, then taped that side up:

I had to smack it with a hammer to get the pieces to line back up. If you have never welded on stainless . . . you have NO idea how much that metal can move. It is CRAZY!

Since I had my hands occupied, here is the finished piece:

Most of the discoloration outside of the actual weld is the residue from the tape. The manifold is going to be sandblasted in preparation for ceramic coating, otherwise I would be a bit more attentive at cleaning that stuff up. Pete evidently likes to shift dirty things, so this is my little bit of payback. (JUST KIDDING, PETE! LOL!)

Weld closeup:

Since the fitup isn't perfect, the beads aren't really all that wonderful looking. This is the first time I'm welding this stuff and I'm no dummy so I starting with the pieces that are hidden in the back out of site. LOL!

I had a heck of a time figuring out how to mock up the rest of the stuff since I have two hands and the clamps that I have, while useful, aren't exactly wide enough to completely support the weight of the pieces of this manifold. So . . . I got creative:

I found some tube that slip fit into the straight pipe very snugly. I discovered that the ID of the els isn't exactly the same as the ID of the pipe, so I had to get even more creative and cut out a slice from the tube an ended up with this:

Which allowed me to do this:

And that is how I ended the night. =) 

The first cut is the hardest. (Not necessarily the deepest . . . )

As an aside from the really gross crap I'm dealing with the rest of my day, I took a break and made the first cut in what will be many for Pete's custom twin scroll turbo manifold.

The manifold is being made from 1.5" Stainless Steel Schedule 40 pipe and bends (also knows as weld els, short for elbows). In the above pic, you can see that I cut a 45* cast elbow in half (it is very nearly actually a perfect cut). I forgot to grab a pic of why I did this, but basically, I wanted to minimize the transition angle between two runners of the exhaust, in this case, #2 and #3, and make accessing the bolts for the flange and engine mount easier. This leads me into thinking I really need to write up an article on handling and welding Stainless, as it is far, far different than dealing with normal steels, even to the point of requiring special markers so as to prevent corrosion.

I spent a bit of time cleaning up the saw cut, which you can see the "as cut" finish here:

 And here is the finished part:

Why go through the extra step when the saw cut is fine? Because Stainless. The basics of Stainless are:

PREPARATION! A good plan solves many issues before they start.
CLEANLINESS! It is NEVER too clean.
FITMENT! Perfect is not an option.
BACKPURGING! If you want it to last.

I'll definitely have to work on an article . . . And I just added that to my to-do list for next week. 

Mike's Bike is (99.5%) DONE!

I completed nearly everything! I have to make one last trip to Home Depot to pick up one more hex head bolt in 6mmx1.00 thread, since I over estimated the length of one of the needed bolts and need to straighten that out. After that, the only thing left is to source to stainless locking nuts, the kind without the plastic locking insert, since I don't want any heat melting the inserts and allowing the battery tray to drop . . . That would be a bad thing. For sure. Let me show you what I am talking about!

Mockup . . . one of my favorite things. Measuring 2xelventy trillion times, cutting/welding/drilling once. It saves time in the long run!

Here's the battery tray (again):

Here is one of the flanges Dave helped make while I was working on something else:

I had to figure out a way to make those flanges stay on and support the battery tray in a secure manner. Normally, I would try to figure out a way to do so horizontally, but given the low profile and also the requirement to make things easily accessible, I chose to use existing threaded inserts in a clever way.

This is the existing threaded insert:

I simply drilled through the hole with a smaller bit (after centerpunching it to prevent the bit from wandering too much) and ran a tap through the hole and test it with a piece of threaded rod I had:

 Poifect! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!

Here is the basic idea:

With that settled, I had to move on to figuring out how to secure the seat pan. Due to my design of the seat pan, I really only needed to ensure that the seat pan would not pop off the frame rails. The locator pieces lock the seat pan longitudinally, so I just had to make it so that the seat could come off fairly easily but not be accidently popped off.

Here is a view from the underside to refresh our memories of what everything looked like.

Hmmmm . . . That elliptical hole of the frame bracing looks pretty suspiciously well placed . . .

What if I made a plate to cover that, with a hole in the center that would be large enough to fit a stud through it, which would be welded on to the seat pan and then secured with a wing nut? Oh look! A suspiciously perfect stud ready to get welded to the seat pan!

I also took the liberty of cleaning up the edges of the curved section of the seat pan so that it was even all the way around.

Shazam! I distracted you long enough to have made a nice looking place from some stainless I had leftover from the handle of the charcoal started I had assembled for my father for Father's Day:

Now doesn't that look swanky?

Closeups are always good:

Back to the battery tray . . .

Here is one of the hex headed bolts.

Why did I bother with bolts? Well . . . I wanted somethign replaceable. I have seen way too many bolts get stripped out and if I welded something in place, it would make things a lot harder to replace in the future. With a bolt, you can simply unscrew it and replace it with another one. I couldn't find stainless bolts in the right size at Home Despot, so this will certainly do for now.

Here is a shot of how the bolt goes through the threaded insert and the hole that I drilled and tapped for the bolt:

I marked and drilled (intentionally) oversized holes (to allow for ease of installation):

Then noted that the "legs" of the brackets stuck up much too far:

I used a chisel point King Size Sharpie (thought I'd be done mentioning them, didn't you? HAH!) to get an approximation of how much I had to trim off. I fired up the band saw and got to sawing the excess off, cleaning them up on the belt/disc sander and ended up with this:

And then welded them on to the tray:

Not too shabby looking. Not perfect, but pretty decent. A locking nut will complete the kit when I can find some of those things, or Mike can find them, too. I'm not picky. heh

Magic tip time! I wanted to try something with making a spacer to prevent the seat pan from getting pulled too far down with the wing nut. I cut a small piece of 1/2" aluminum rod and evened up the ends. I wanted to drill a hole down the middle of the short section, but attempting to hold that in my fingers would be finger-a-cide, so I came up with a simple but highly effective clamp that gave me enough leverage to prevent the rod section from spinning.

It took a long time to tap this darn thing. I had forgotten my number drill set (you likely have no idea what I am talking about . . . unless you are a machinist or very familiar with drilling and tapping holes), so I didn't have exactly the right twist drill (commonly known as a drill bit, which isn't exactly correct) size on hand to make tapping through that section easy. But I managed. I so wanted a lathe. I would have been done in less than 5 minutes, including all the tool changes. LOL! Oh well . . .

This is what it ended up looking like:

But my measuring was off:

 Remember that whole measure a lot of times and cut/drill/weld once thing? Yeah . . . But, after testing things out, I determined that it wasn't necessary to have the spacer there at all, since the pan is 18g steel, it barely flexes when you crank on the wing nut . . . Next time, I think 20g will be easier and faster to work with. LOL!

Nearly final battery tray installed:

And the final profile view of the seat pan and battery tray on the frame:

It looks really sleek! I can't wait to see how the rest of the bike comes together! Mike's got some good plans. =)