Does anyone know of any welding teachers in Burlington or Halton area?

[Maker Mike]

I'm not sure if any of the newer lathes are like this, but the small south bends were mounted at three points, which helped with the leveling and twisting concerns.

I'm not really any good at mig welding but, the main problems I have are when I'm trying to weld something that is in a less than ideal position. I would spend money on a decent helmet as that was the biggest improvement for me. Not seeing where you are welding makes it difficult.

 

[Stuart Samuel]

Even a very poor weld can be incredibly strong ..... as I have proven over and over and will likely continue to validate that theory. Just start welding.

At work, we recently had a back and forth with a federal government project in PEI, cleaning up some light fixtures. At their request, we (not me) welded up some hooks (1/2-13 female thread) and loops (1/4-18 NPS), to reinstall some of the fixtures. The government got a structural engineer involved, and we ended up load testing (and sending out for visual inspection...) all of the welds, to 500 lbs (the heaviest light is 60 lbs).

The folks doing the work have learned on the job, and were doing their best. The test equipment was inadvertently set to kilos, rather than pounds, and the hooks started to distort around 800lbs. Welds were fine. With even semi-reasonable settings, you're more likely to see a failure in the base material than the weld.

That said, I do love destructive testing.

 

[TonyK]

I recently bought a welding setup to start learning basic welding in my "spare" time, and I'd really like to find someone local who can teach me the basics. I know I can just use Youtube and learn myself by building projects, but I'd like to excellerate the learning process (if possible) by having someone walk me through the basics. Hopefully, that way I can try and avoid common mistakes, as well as avoiding bad habits. I'd like to build a new lathe stand very soon and would rather not spend months fumbling my way through that project.

I'm more than happy to pay them for the lessons, I just don't want to have to take a full course at a community college as I have no intentions of making it into a career. And my searches for workshops hasn't really turned up any results.

Thanks,

Jason

I live in Grimsby. If you are interested contact me and I will show you what I have and try to understand what you want to weld. I have a Mig, Tig/Stick welder and we can go over the basics. I had a pull away TIG, but went to a Fronius Magic Wave 230, truth, I had to learn how to weld again as the machine was so different than what I have been using for 30 years.

TonyK.

Grimsby Ontario Canada.

 

[Susquatch]

As we have discussed before, if the fill is for vibration dampening, that's a different property than rigidity & strength.

I agree with what you said initially, but not with your last point. I think the use of the word rigidity gets us all into a lot trouble because many of us use the words differently.

You said, vibration dampening is a different property from rigidity and strength.

I would have said that rigidity and vibration dampening are a different property from strength.

At the risk of oversimplifying, although not really disconnected, Rigidity is a hypertonic state characterized by constant resistance throughout a range of motion that is independent of the velocity of movement. Essentially rigidity is a property of materials that responds to vibration. High rigidity approaches a natural frequency of zero. Ideal for machine tools because vibrations are absorbed.

Low rigidity does not mean low strength. It just means that vibrations are transmitted instead of being absorbed. Cast iron is better than steel, and Epoxy Granite is better than Cast Iron.

I have said this many many times before: it is relatively easy to make a stand that is strong enough and it is relatively difficult to make a stand that is rigid enough.

 

[Lucky7]

Even a very poor weld can be incredibly strong ..... as I have proven over and over and will likely continue to validate that theory. Just start welding. I'll load your trunk up with new (unrusted) carbon steel scrap to practice on if you like, then have at it. Read a page or two on it or watch a basic MIG video, then start welding. Then start asking questions about the results you're getting. There are many ways to approach learning something, and my first stop is usually to acquire a book on the topic and read ..... but for welding, read a couple of pages on the basics and dig in is my recommendation.



Vibration damping is irrc is a property of how fast a wave decays. As I recall EG has about twice the damping properties of CI, which is twice that of steel. A normalized steel exoskelton filled with EG always struck me as the ultmate machine tool frame. Young modulus of EG 1/4 - 1/2 that of cast iron (more or less, memories from a long time ago), so its less rigid but it contributes a lot as you usually end up producing fairly large section compared to that of a steel or CI structure.

Drawing a blank. What is EG?

 

[Stuart Samuel]

Drawing a blank. What is EG?

Maybe epoxy/granite?

 

[Mcgyver]

sorry for undefined acronym, Stuart nailed it....epoxy granite. Basically epoxy and sand for the max amount of vibration damping boundary layer material