Daily Fabrication Thread

[tule peak timber]

The beer is cold and the BBQ is hot. 8)

[caveman]

We have a few projects going on at school.  I made a table for our setter a few weeks ago and a few young students and I have been tinkering with a man lift lately.  The bottom part, used as the platform was some piece of scrap that had been lying around for years.  We added the expanded metal, sides, gate and fork tubes.  It still needs paint, but it got a coat of tannic acid today.  



 

 

 

 

[mike_belben]

These sized oak stumps used to take me an hour to pop with just a blade and leave a huge crater to fill.  Now its like 15 minutes and i can drag the stump off in any direction, then open the rake to fill the hole nicely with a straight blade.  With a conventional rake flopping around you can only backdrag which means youre spending all day positioning.  Removing and reinstalling a pin on rake can be nearly an hour.  Now its about 8 seconds.

Tree spear works excellent.  A D3 suddenly pushes over what a d5 is normally needed for.  This thing grubs a fencerow or understory ridiculously fast and with incredible dexterity. You can easily pick one leader of a clump to segregate out and bust down with the spear on a 6 way.  So glad i followed thru with this.

[aigheadish]

Holy Socks! Hey Mike! I was just thinking about you and this thread the other day! I don't know if you've been posting elsewhere but I haven't seen you forever, welcome back!

That tree spear looks like a beast!

[teakwood]

Mike, i don't see it quite right on the fotos. do you have like a root rake and also a straight blade on at the same time?? or you need to change them out?

[mike_belben]

Thanks aig, i had to take a hiatus to free my attention for some intense medical stuff.

Ramon my friend you are correct.

I had a neighbor who wanted me to grub the understory from his back yard and with a straight blade that was terribly mess, dug big holes chasing little spindly saplings and lost a lot of topsoil so i built a bolt on semi U for one corner to grub precisely and went on the job.  It worked exceptionally well but i blew a cylinder packing really bad and had to bring it home as all were leaking and costing tons of oil.  Well i couldnt get half the cylinder pins out and had to pull the whole blade with rods on the blade and bodies still pinned to chassis. And thats when i found a bunch of stuff was shot, and corner force had started to buckle one angle cylinder rod bad enough to cant the piston in the bore and cause wear.  I realized the machine was doomed unless the hardest forces were centered up between the steer cylinders and invented the spear rake to accomplish that.   Its narrow on purpose to protect my 6 way components doing roughing work with a finishing machine.












I dont know the hours but this thing has a reskinned blade and is on ATLEAST its 3rd trunion ball whic i had to put about 5lb of weld on after someone else already had.  Thats a 4 bolt cat d4 trunion welded onto a komatsu in place of the 2 bolt.

The machine is too sloppy to make a living in dirt finishing. Without a winch and a huge quiver of other iron it has no real place in logging, and unless youre a highgrader logging here is riches to rags. My local market is dominated by dollars that want to subdivide old ratty farms into retirement homes. So i built it into a dedicated fencerow machine and also set the quad up to be a slick fencer until junior blew something up that i havent dug into yet.  I will still log under the guise of dirtwork but i will buy the timber myself via discount on the job quote.  Will put a winch on the machine, and the grapple can lift logs so i dont have to dig choker holes.   I rent a parcel next door to me that is becoming a concentration yard with semi truck access, where my knuckleboom lives, and i have finally got a direct veneer buyer. The firewood business here sucks as bad as logging but that yard will probably also have a processing side when my son gets older.

I also am building a goat herd for rental clearing so that the same retirees that called me to do the fencerow, call me every year to give me money to feed my goats from within their fences i installed.  Ideally my entire growing season will mean goats that never come home and me just moving them from check to check and looking at the "hey ive got another little job for you to look at"s.  Thats where all my work comes from, the same people over and over.

I know you only asked about a root rake but it all ties together in one big web.  That was all of my heaviest steel collection that id been preserving for something unknown but really important forever.  Literally a pile of junk i always knew was gonna become the shovel that digs my whole life out of the hole. Just didnt know what itd look like for the decade i was sparing it.

[teakwood]

Mike, i wish you all the best and hope your plan will all work out. good luck

[caveman]

I'm still struggling with pictures a bit.  This is a project one of my ag students did for his mother for Christmas.  He cut out some different sized flowers on the plasma cutter, formed them and welded them to some round stock.  He spent a good bit of time on it and it turned out pretty well.  

It will likely get him an interview at an artistic metal shop in the area.  He currently is the low man at a plant nursery, so he mixes a lot of potting soil and moves a lot of potted plants.

Guess what his mom's name is.

[thecfarm]

Rose will like it !!!
That looks like he's been doing that type of work for 20 years.    
WOW!!!!

[tacks Y]

I will take a guess  Daisy?  Maybe Rose?

[barbender]

 In my welding class in school, we were split into 2 groups- with one going to the arc welders and one going to the gas welding table. I was in the gas welding group, and I'm glad I learned it that way. I think gas welding helps you to understand heat control better, and you can see and understand what is happening. Arc welding is a little violent and shocking at first😁

[newoodguy78]

Nice to see a young guy with talent putting it towards a project like that. 
My son has taken an interest in blacksmithing, I really enjoy seeing what young minds create when they're allowed to use the big boys toys. 

[DanielW]

Wasn't today, but not long ago I built a shingle bundler - based off the old Chase/Lane ones. The end plates unlatch when you lift them up and flop down so you can pull the bundle out. A scissor jack mounted below the table compresses the hooks when extended. The table has a large groove for a 1X3 to be placed below the bundle and a smaller groove within that for the strap to feed through.

Place the bottom 1X3, stack the shingles, place the top 1X3, compress, staple the strap around, release tension, flop the side down, and remove the bundle.

Crude, but effective.

[Don P]

Sweet! I've always wanted to run into a used one but never have. Good job!

[caveman]

Some of my ag mech kids and I are building JMoore a trailer for his family's cart.  This is it upside down and tacked together.  It is being mostly made out of stuff lying around the shop. He'll have to buy a coupler, jack and the metal to make the tongue. 

[Resonator]

Nobody sitting down on that job...

[moodnacreek]

I need to get Mike B. up here to weld a tooth bar on the head board of the rear mount log picker truck so I can scrape the loose bark off logs.  Any one ever hear of this idea?

[mike_belben]

I dunno doug lately i been breakin a lotta welds off.  Not sure if its the trees or the 80 hp im trying to shove up the trees ash thats the culprit.  Maybe im losing my touch! 

I bet a hinged half round with some scarifier plates could debark the loose stuff pretty well. Like a pull thru line scriber. 

[moodnacreek]

I always let myself get behind sawing. The logs that degrade fast like pine or maple get sawn first but oak and spruce get pushed aside and often get sawn when the bark is starting to come off. And then they bring in logs that have been saved awhile. It makes an awful mess in the mill and gets caught in the works on the carriage.  All the logs get handled with one of the old picker trucks, a rear mount on the IH and a cab mount on the ford. Both are off the road these days so I can do what I want.  Some kind of nasty rugged teeth sticking up like on the last bunk I think would allow Me to scrape a lot of loose bark off.                                  I have never done anything someone else has not but always meet them after.

[mike_belben]

What about just droppin em ontop each other a few times?

[Firewoodjoe]

I dunno doug lately i been breakin a lotta welds off.  Not sure if its the trees or the 80 hp im trying to shove up the trees ash thats the culprit.  Maybe im losing my touch!

I bet a hinged half round with some scarifier plates could debark the loose stuff pretty well. Like a pull thru line scriber.

Mike what rod are u using? I always used 7018 and 6011 but was busting welds. I stopped using 7018 and switched back to 7014. Problem quite. I think the 7018 really needs to be stored right and preheated to be right. 7014 and 6011 root pass seems to be a better solution for me.  

[Hilltop366]

I watched Mikes videos, I don't think there is much wrong with the welding and has a great concept for the pusher/stump rake/grapple for the dozer it just needs to be stepped up a bit in materials. The kind of forces going on there would require much heaver and larger section tubing and/or solid and with full depth welds to hold up in order to survive a long service life.  In case its not clear Mike I'm cheering you on here not knocking you at all.

[mike_belben]

Thanks hilltop i didnt take it that way.  The spear was bulletproof when it was just gravity hinged.  Adding the hyd cylinder to open and close it added a host of versatile new ways to smoosh it into things and a massive new vector of unforseen forces from all those ways.  It just wasnt braced in the right planes for the forces i overlooked and started cracking but i didnt have the option to stop and fix so i banged it out and just let the thing fold up. Either the stump moves, the dozer moves or the thing in between them breaks.  But hey i got paid, the kids arent hungry and itll get a revamping when it comes home.  Could still be a pile of steel laying in the dirt and i could just get on the dole but where is the fun in that? What would the boy learn if he didnt see me folding stuff up and showing him why it folded?

Joe its all er70s6 mig. I dont have a stick welder, i wish.  The welds stayed put, the material next to the weld snapped off or just buckled in every case.  3/16 wall where it needs to be 3/8.  Poor people fab, use whatever is in the pile cuz the wallet is empty and steel is at an all time high.  40ft goosenecks are approaching 30 grand now.

[mike_belben]

I need to get Mike B. up here to weld a tooth bar on the head board of the rear mount log picker truck so I can scrape the loose bark off logs.  Any one ever hear of this idea?

I got a junkpile solution for ya ol buddy.  Get your bifocals on and zoom around a while.

[mike_belben]

Its a truck axle mounted vertical up against your headache rack so that the debarker can swing and let the log turn with the arc of your knuckleboom as you swing the carbody to pull logs through.  The axle is just a big cheap serviceable stout pivot post to build onto.  

The rims are bolted on.  One welded to your main rail on bottom, then triangulated braces from your housing to your headache rack.  

Now the top rim is the platform to build off of. A suitable spread bar gets welded across the rim, and then a pair of half rounds from a truck or tractor rim welded as uprights to cradle the log. Inside the rims you weld in steel scraps to hold the log up and rip the bark.  But in between them you bolt in hay rake spring tines that stand an inch or so proud of the scarified teeth.  The teeth hold the log up from crushing the spring tines. 

The rake tines compress and follow the contours of the log helping clean it off. A chain prevents the thing from spinning too far, and some plywood or tin underneath direct the falling bark to collect mostly in a hopper or pile for scooping out.  Hopefully you can find someone with a tub grinder/dye/bagger operation that wants your bark for mulch. Maybe even gives ya couple bucks or comes to fetch it atleast, saving you a trip.  

Or you could put up a sign calling it some kinda miracle grow garden fertility enhancer and charge the citiots by the scoop. It does harbor a lotta good soil bugs.