All "professional fabricators" are NOT the same, and many aren't even acceptable...

[Ace-Garageguy]

 

[bobss396]

We had a couple of large fixture plates at work, certain jobs were impossible without them. We had one 100% dedicated to a Navy shipboard beam antenna array, about 20' long. The table was 24' long and about 6' wide. The job only ran a few times after the initial runs. They called the guy who assembled it out of retirement to build the last ones. BUT... they documented everything he did.

[TonyK]

Decided to watch this even though the subject probably wouldn't interest me but I was curious. Very entertaining and sad. I'm guessing if this guy was to question each of those shops on their "fails" they wouldn't understand why it has to be perfect. Close enough is the motto these days.

[TarheelRick]

Haven't done any real fabrication/welding work in more than 42 years. That was in the middle of my USAF career, we used steel tables - "good enough for government work". As a matter of fact, I had never seen a MIG welder until just as I was being retrained out of welding in 1981. I was aircraft certified in stainless steel, titanium, aluminum, and inconel, had to be to repair aircraft parts. I can definitely see the benefits of such a table. Would be a real joy, and an almost necessity, putting together a tube frame for a V-8 powered Pinto or a Pinto 4-cylinder powered T-Bucket. Thanks for sharing the video.

[BlackSheep214]

I found it very interesting. I agree, not all.fab are alike no matter how many years one have worked in the field. Thanks for sharing.

[Ace-Garageguy]

3 hours ago, TonyK said:

Decided to watch this even though the subject probably wouldn't interest me but I was curious. Very entertaining and sad. I'm guessing if this guy was to question each of those shops on their "fails" they wouldn't understand why it has to be perfect. Close enough is the motto these days.

And the truly annoying thing there is that the customer clearly stated on the drawing what constituted "close enough", which apparently not one of the shops looked at, comprehended, or bothered to try to comply with (pick one).

The phenomenon of getting back substandard work almost every time I had somebody else do something on my own cars (when I was "white collar") was one of the primary drivers of me learning how to do everything myself, and led me into doing it all for a living.

Edited February 5, 2024 by Ace-Garageguy

[BlackSheep214]

"Do it right or don't do it at all" is what dad used to preach when I was a teen. 

[1972coronet]

I've been saying this for 40 years...

[BlackSheep214]

Measure twice, cut once is another good tip. LOL!!

[redscampi]

"I cut it three times and it's still too short!"

[bobss396]

16 hours ago, redscampi said:

"I cut it three times and it's still too short!"

We had a couple of B-1B bomber electronics boxes in from the field with damaged tubing on the cooling plates. So I got a quote from a few places, supplied prints, shop sketches and a white paper. We decided on a local shop that did a lot of heat exchangers for us when we were in production.

Round 1, we got the 2 items back and the 90 degree fittings were 180 degrees out. So they went back. Round 2, the fittings were in the right place, but they both were 1" too short. We had the vendor in both times for a raking over the coals. In the end they made it right after the 3rd try.

[redscampi]

2 hours ago, bobss396 said:

We had a couple of B-1B bomber electronics boxes in from the field with damaged tubing on the cooling plates. So I got a quote from a few places, supplied prints, shop sketches and a white paper. We decided on a local shop that did a lot of heat exchangers for us when we were in production.

Round 1, we got the 2 items back and the 90 degree fittings were 180 degrees out. So they went back. Round 2, the fittings were in the right place, but they both were 1" too short. We had the vendor in both times for a raking over the coals. In the end they made it right after the 3rd try.

This reminds me of an incident that happened very early in my career. I might have been able to foresee the issue if I'd had more experience but I was fresh out of college. Like you, I was involved in aerospace. We had a project to fabricate inner engine cowls for an antique airplane being restored by company retirees. The originals had been removed during restoration activities and subsequently lost (A thing that happens way too often in a supposedly controlled environment). The "engineering drawing", also done by retirees, consisted of an 11X14 sheet of paper with an oblique sketch and a couple of side views drawn out with a few relevant dimensions. I showed this iffy drawing to the hammer shop guy and he said he could make it. Fabrication involved creation of a huge punch and die and many hours over the course of months. Finally, the parts were done. The engineers were ecstatic and loaded them up and took them back to the airplane where it was determined that they had been fabbed completely backwards (180 degrees out). The whole thing had to be done again.

[Mike C]

20 hours ago, BlackSheep214 said:

Measure twice, cut once is another good tip. LOL!!

MY Dad always says that. His hobby is (or maybe was as he's 91 now) woodworking.

[Monty]

Wish I could get my younger brother on your team.  He does amazing work in mig and tig welding, and the company he works for has clients whose names you'd instantly recognize.  Me?  I was a C- student in gas welding, so I didn't consider this to be any part of my career path.  

[bobss396]

I learned how to arc weld in HS. I did just about everyone's welding that had to be right. In auto school, I took a formal course in arc and gas welding. I used to trade doing mandatory welding projects for pitchers of beer at the campus bar. I guaranteed then at least a B for a grade.

Gas welding came in handy with the stock cars for putting roofs back on after the roll cage was in. I did a lot of brazing too.

At work, we did a lot of waveguide RF work. Anything from low-frequency large stainless steel material stock to small high-frequency coil silver stock. Flanges were heavier brass investment castings, commercial choke flanges too. Some of the stainless tubing we slit to install custom-made chokes. They got put together using silver solder, soft solder using a small torch, some were done on hot plates. We also did large systems from aluminum stock, those were all jigged and pinned then set out for dip brazing. With almost anything we did, they required the flanges to be machined after.

[stitchdup]

I did a welding course in the late 90s. It was a course i had no choice but to do (i'd been unemployed for 6 weeks so was forced to do the course or my dole would be stopped) and it was a complete waste of time. There was no actual welding done at any time yet i became a qualified welder out of it. If you've ever seen the bottom of a chicken coop, then you've seen my welding though the stuff on the coop probably holds better. Come to think of it, my mums soup probably holds better than my welds

[Ace-Garageguy]

3 hours ago, stitchdup said:

I did a welding course in the late 90s. It was a course i had no choice but to do (i'd been unemployed for 6 weeks so was forced to do the course or my dole would be stopped) and it was a complete waste of time.  There was no actual welding done at any time yet i became a qualified welder out of it. If you've ever seen the bottom of a chicken coop, then you've seen my welding though the stuff on the coop probably holds better. Come to think of it, my mums soup probably holds better than my welds

Many years ago, after my own shop got hit and cleaned out by thieves, I worked at a pretty well known independent exotic-car shop for a while. There was a "certified welder" on call to do the structural work on unibody and tubular structures, and though I was a competent gas (oxy-acetylene) welder at the time, I figgered I'd learn a lot from the guy.

Anyway, seeing the absolute and total dog's breakfast he made out of front-clipping a Pantera, and later the rear engine cradle on a Miura, I pretty much lost faith in the welding "certification" meaning much...and I've since had the pleasure to encounter more guys who were "certified" and were equally bad.

And I've said this before...I know a few guys who have every ASE and I-CAR certification it's possible to get, and I wouldn't let any of them work on a rusty old lawnmower.

A flashy piece of paper hanging on the wall means nothing, no matter what profession you're in. Real-world competence is all that counts.

Edited February 13, 2024 by Ace-Garageguy
TYPO

[stitchdup]

Yup for 1500 quid i can do every test for heavy construction plant, from a skid steer to a tower crane. Its a half day course..... and apparently its legal but in reality they only show you a dvd of someone using the machines.  To do it right is thousands per test but even after doing these courses i wouldn't let them look at the keys, even though the bit of paper makes them legal to take them on the road. I've seen what a skilled driver can do in a digger, when my cousin found out how much a stab driver was going to cost him he welded (properly, lol) a bracket on an old digger bucket so he could flip the stabs into place on the bucket without getting out each time. saves him thousands but also saved him a lot of time. But he spent his childhood driving diggers as his dad is the repair guy. He taught himself to crack open eggs with the digger and is skilled enough he's the guy bomb disposal or the military planes archeologists call every time they need a digger driver on the islands. He's dug up 8 ww2 planes so far but i dont know who's they were

[Ace-Garageguy]

3 hours ago, bobss396 said:

I learned how to arc weld in HS...In auto school, I took a formal course in arc and gas welding.

Gas welding came in handy with the stock cars for putting roofs back on after the roll cage was in. I did a lot of brazing too...

I learned to gas-weld first, as the race shop I turned wrenches at hired a guy to come in and to do some repair work on the tube-frame of our little Abarth (SCCA) D-sports-racer (a highly modified 1000 Spider Sport running a 750cc Fiat-based twincam...NOT the later 1000 Sport Prototipo) after the shop owner stuffed it. Gas welding was something I really wanted to learn, as the equipment was much more financially accessible than MIG or TIG...and I'd read that the tube frames in many race cars at the time were still gas-welded...and you could easily see that's how the little Abarth frame was built.

The contract guy was very good, turned out we had mutual friends in the normal world, and he showed me the basics and how to set up practice assemblies. I practiced and practiced and practiced, and took over the gas-welding operations at that shop. Interestingly, lots of older European race-car tube-frames were factory brazed, so I had to get that down too, to do resto work correctly.

I've made all kinds of stuff using oxy-acetylene, from brackets to headers, and eventually learned to hydrogen-gas-weld soft aluminum body panels on vintage cars (because at another shop, every time they sent one out to be TIGed, it would crack right next to the welds in a few weeks or months of use).

When my own shop got hit (my post above) and after seeing the horrible stuff the "certified" welder was doing with a MIG, I figgered I needed to learn that too. A Dan-Mig was the first major purchase I made when I reopened my own place. I bought a how-to book and practiced, practiced, practiced again. Then learned to do pretty spot-welds with it, which led me into doing heavy structural crash repair on late-model unibody stuff.

In 1995 after dissolving the disastrous company I'd backed to build fabricated 9" Ford housings (great design, very skilled fabricator partner who unfortunately had personal issues I refused to accommodate after a while), one of the pieces of equipment I'd bought was a top-line (then) Miller TIG setup. Rather than offing it to recover sunk costs, I learned to use it too, and never looked back. I'm not the best guy with a TIG, for sure, but I can get by with aircraft work that's inspected by someone who has a clue.

One thing...I found that having learned gas-welding first was a tremendous help learning the other forms.

And something that's hard for me to get my head around...I know mechanics and techs (including one old-timer who's the resident "expert" at a resto shop) who don't even know the difference between the various means of sticking two pieces of metal together with heat. 

But then again...all the soft-tech guys know that everyone who makes a living with his hands is a mouth-breathing knuckle-dragger, and any chimp can do it. 

 

Edited February 13, 2024 by Ace-Garageguy

[TarheelRick]

6 minutes ago, Ace-Garageguy said:

One thing...I found that having learned gas-welding first was a tremendous help learning the other forms.

 

Absolutely correct. When I graduated high-school (got kicked out is more accurate)I attended a local Technical School's welding course. It was an attempt to avoid the 'draft' as long as possible. The first quarter was spent exclusively on gas welding techniques, the remaining three quarters were divided equally with arc, MIG, and TIG. However, our instructor would occasionally sneak in a project which required gas-welding to complete. Overall I enjoyed TIG most, especially while welding in the USAF. One project that I enjoyed most was while I was stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH. It was a civilian project involving building a flying replica of the original Wright-B flyer. They needed some brackets welded and I had the opportunity to do those. From my understanding the replica actually flew; not sure whatever happened to it.

[Ace-Garageguy]

1 minute ago, TarheelRick said:

Absolutely correct. When I graduated high-school (got kicked out is more accurate)I attended a local Technical School's welding course. It was an attempt to avoid the 'draft' as long as possible. The first quarter was spent exclusively on gas welding techniques, the remaining three quarters were divided equally with arc, MIG, and TIG. However, our instructor would occasionally sneak in a project which required gas-welding to complete. Overall I enjoyed TIG most, especially while welding in the USAF. One project that I enjoyed most was while I was stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB, OH. It was a civilian project involving building a flying replica of the original Wright-B flyer. They needed some brackets welded and I had the opportunity to do those. From my understanding the replica actually flew; not sure whatever happened to it.

Very cool.  

Best TIG guy I ever worked with called it "gentlemens' welding". He really was a wizard, and an inspiration to keep practicing.  

[TarheelRick]

I think one of the first things about TIG that impressed me most was no need to wear leather sleeves/jackets. You could weld in normal clothing. That being said I did learn very early on that it is not advisable to TIG weld for a couple of hours while wearing a short sleeve shirt. Major burn to the skin, but lesson learned.

[bobss396]

Gas welding gives you the hand-eye coordination that spills over into other forms of welding. 

[NOBLNG]

On 2/13/2024 at 11:12 AM, Ace-Garageguy said:

Very cool.  

Best TIG guy I ever worked with called it "gentlemens' welding". He really was a wizard, and an inspiration to keep practicing.  

Yeah, try doing this (not my welding) with a wire feeder.

 

 

Edited February 15, 2024 by NOBLNG
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