Daily Fabrication Thread

[Walnut Beast]

wow.  pretty soon plasma cutters will look like Ipads if they keep going!

😂. It's good up to 7/8 cutting and 1 1/8 severance 

[mike_belben]

Had to make a light trailer mover attachment with the ball up near the tractor for moving bigger stuff.  That tag trailer is 4k when the forward axles are in.  Theres no motor in the ford but i was surprised the little bota was able to lift and pull it all.  The top receiver is for gooseneck and 5th wheel stuff.  I will probably make a gooseneck log arch eventually. 

[Walnut Beast]

1/2 plate steel and 3/16 aluminum tread plate cut like butter with the little Hypertherm 

 

 

   

[mjeselskis]

1/2 plate steel and 3/16 aluminum tread plate cut like butter with the little Hypertherm  

 

 

 

That looks pretty sweet. What model is that?

[Crusarius]

I have a 375x that is going to get replaced by a hypertherm one day. but that day will wait till I get my 5x12 cnc table built.

[Walnut Beast]

1/2 plate steel and 3/16 aluminum tread plate cut like butter with the little Hypertherm  

 

 

 

That looks pretty sweet. What model is that?

45xp

[caveman]

On post #641 I shared a picture of a bracket one of my students who recently graduated was working on.  He was in my shop yesterday cutting out some stuff on the plasma table and showed me a picture of the bracket mounted in the Jeep.

 

For those of you with Hypertherm plasma cutters, where do you get your consumables?  Do any of you use non-Hypertherm consumables with good results?  

I bought some 4x8, 16 gauge steel yesterday.  In December it was $56 a sheet, February it was $84 and yesterday it was $136.

[21incher]

I have an old 45 on my cnc table and only purchase Hypertherm consumables. They cut thousands of inches if the start off is properly set. I have purchased them from Bakers Gas and Welding Supplies IOC at discounts. Supposed to be another increase in steel prices coming because of demand for new shipping containers. The old ones are not making it back to China now due to trucker and dock worker shortages.

[mike_belben]

Boy its always somethin.  Good thing that inflation is staying around 2% i guess. 

:

[mike_belben]

So ive got 2 of the last 4 issues worked out of my log jammer.  It only took loading a few logs to know that you really need a swing boom that has swing limits, and that you need a full swivel pulley with a cable guide.  


So i tossed on some limit chains, one per side.






And built the swivel.  Mine looks funky because i have to be able to feed the cable eye through every time i use the trailer. Winch stays on the tractor. 

























Boy signed off on it so it must be good enough. 

[barbender]

Mike I've tried finding some of those old PTO jammers, pretty much all of the pictures I found were on the forum🤷🏽‍♂️

[mike_belben]

Ive seen a few now in old logging films.  Steam powered rail car loaders had them.  They seemed to all be way too fast and always with a man standing right there diving over a flying log to line them up on the pile and untong. 


Biggest thing i need to do now is an alternator bracket.  Ive gone to big dual batteries and can barely start the stupid machine again.  You need a large alternator for constant electric winch use.  Itll hurt batteries and every copper contactor in the system otherwise.  The generator on it is like a trickle charger. 10amp max  :

[barbender]

Well I'm in the middle if a hard lesson on big battery and big alternator- I managed to leave the key turned on on my Woodmizer and milled the battery almost stone dead. No problem, had the skidloader right there so gave it a quick jump. The alternator (180 amp) belt was squealing under the load of charging, so I thought I would up the rpms. Then the belt exploded. Couldn't even find a chunk big enough to get the numbers for a replacement😂 To add injury to insult, I burned my wrist on the smoking hot alternator pulley😬 Now I'm trying to find the motivation to go out and try it all again with a new belt😁 

There are lots of flavors of "jammers", the ones that were truck and tractor mounted were a bit different of an animal than the old railcar and logging camp versions. Same in principle but a little more user friendly. Mind you, I've never actually operated one and haven't even been close to one in operation. I'm told some if the factory units, you could slip the load clutch on them effectively enough that you could hold the the load in place. I don't know if that was true of the shop built ones out of differentials. They may have just been winch or drop with nothing in between. I may have said this before, but I heard stories of guys just getting the truck set up in the middle of standing timber and then using the hammer to pull the wood in as they fell it. 

[Gary_C]

I have learned some hard lessons with high amp loads on a trailer behind a pickup. My load was with a hydraulic dump trailer that even had a battery right at the hydraulic pump. Lessons learned were these.

Alternators are not battery chargers. If you fully discharge a battery an alternator will recharge it given enough running time but will burn itself up. 

Also do not run your alternator while using your winch or other high amp load. Alternator will overheat, factory wiring and fuses will overheat and may never be right again. I learned to turn the truck engine off so the alternator was off during high amp use.

If you use the trailer power feed thru the trailer plug, expect fuses to blow regularly. If you put in higher amp fuses expect the fuse contacts to overheat and never be right again. 

Best way is to have an auxiliary battery right next to the load and run a separate heavy power feed from the pickup batteries with an auto reset circuit breaker in the line. Even with that setup, never run the alternator while using auxiliary power.

[Gary_C]

That looks pretty sweet. What model is that?

45xp

What do the consumables cost for that machine?
I assume you always have an air compressor nearby but did you consider one with a built in air compressor?

[mike_belben]

if you fully discharge a battery its gonna sulfate heavily and lose storage capacity, never getting to the same resting voltage again.  and the regulator is gonna see that super low voltage level, demanding full output from the alternator to refill it immediately, which will also boil off some of the acid level and further reduce its storage capacity.  


i dont doubt at all that you experienced these issues but i cant figure out how you manage NOT to overdraw your battery by shutting the vehicle down?  cutting off the alternator almost guarantees the battery gets overdrawn and then the alternator gets a high current load demand to refill it from the regulator.  


ive run around 9k rpms and full field to a weldernator i made.. 90amps at about 140volts output.  it was dead and in the junkpile.   i soldered off the winding lugs for wires direct to an external voltage regulator and a toggle so i could switch between weld and charge mode, also with a rheostat to vary the field.  it gets hot but never stopped working.  regulator are very easy to kill with one little spark and being a homemade machine id forget how i set it up and pop.. another regulator. oops.

    ive used the weld side and varied the rheostat and RPM to dial it in for 24v charging too. the struggle is that you really need 2 alternators to weld with.  one supplying field voltage and one supplying weld voltage.  batteries get run down to nothing by the time you finish a stick.  i used a snowblower chassis with step up ratios for belt power.


deep cycle batteries can handle repeated deep discharges that will kill an automotive starting battery very fast.  

[Gary_C]

i dont doubt at all that you experienced these issues but i cant figure out how you manage NOT to overdraw your battery by shutting the vehicle down?  cutting off the alternator almost guarantees the battery gets overdrawn and then the alternator gets a high current load demand to refill it from the regulator.  

I did not say I overdraw the battery and on a 2002 F-350 with a power feed thru the 7 way trailer plug that is relay controlled, when the engine is off the electrical system of the pickup is disconnected from the auxiliary circuit in the trailer plug. 
Alternators are made to be battery maintainers but not battery chargers. They are not made for continuous running at full rated amps because they will overheat and cook themselves. 

[barbender]

Gary, I hear that all the time, but I don't know if I believe it. The hydraulics on my Woodmizer LT40 Super draw a tremendous amount of power. That alternator works hard the whole time I am using the hydraulics, it's hard to keep the 6 rib v-belt from slipping on the 180 amp alternator. In fact I just had a belt explode yesterday because it was slipping a bit and it got hot and let go. I've replaced the alternator once in the 10+ years I've owned it. I'm pretty sure it was the original alternator as it was 150 amp instead of the 180 amp they are supplied with now (which I upgraded to). Also, I don't know how many vehicles I've jump started ver the years in the frozen north we share, I've never had an alternator give up the ghost when it subsequently charged the dead battery. Actually, I've only had 2 or 3 alternator failures I can think of in 25+ years of driving. I never even started to hear the "alternators can't charge a dead battery" line until about 15 years ago when the cheapo reman alternators the parts stores were selling were failing immediately when installed. I think they were just trying to cover their butts when the remains were of poor quality, or not gone through all the way.

[mike_belben]

internal regulators.. which should have never been put inside in the first place in my opinion, will fail from heat.   the rest is pretty robust. 

ive been winching pretty extensively since 2006. been in 3 or 4 offroad clubs, have pulled tons of cable spotting tons of rigs on comp courses.  never shut engine off, never seen anyone else shut engine off and never killed an alternator.  i dont know whats going on in your situation gary but its peculiar. i think if this was normal, id certainly have known about it 15 years ago. if someone shut a rig off to winch i know a dozen guys would be yelling to turn it back on. 

[Gary_C]

You guys that hardly ever have an alternator fail must not be working hard enough.  :D :D

Seriously back when those old Delco alternators were first popular they were rated at 35 and 40 amps and batteries were maybe rated at 400-500 amp hours. Now we have diesel pickups with two 1000 amp hour rated batteries and a 140-180 amp rated alternator that is loaded with voltage stabilization circuits to protect the many microprocessors in every vehicle. If you look at the math it's easy to see why they say to not use an alternator as a battery charger.

Say you have a diesel pickup with two 900 amp hour batteries and a 150 amp alternator. If you discharge the two batteries to say 50% you need 900 amps or six hours of steady running at full output to bring those batteries back to full charge. But batteries do not take 150 amps for the whole time plus there are other electrical demands on the vehicle so the full charge time may be more like 12-15 hours. You can be sure that alternator is going to be smoking hot during that time as it will be too dumb to limit it's output to the rated amps at all times. Now maybe in the winter in MN when most dead batteries occur, you can get by without serious damage to an alternator when battery charging. However it is not good for the batteries either to charge at a full rate for long times. 

As far as for auxiliary electrical loads like a winch or hydraulic power pack, it's hard to compare because of many differences in load and wiring. On my hydraulic dump trailer where I am lifting 26,000 lbs of grain plus trailer there is a huge load on the deep cycle battery that is located right next to the pump motor and I can sometimes dump a load every two hours. On the many dump days I usually have to put a battery charger on the deep cycle while loading or the battery cannot keep up. The only way to draw from the pickup batteries during dumping would have been to run heavy duty welding cables from the pickup batteries to the hydraulic pump as the internal wiring on the pickup would not take the amp draw.

[PoginyHill]

I was looking to raise the height of the drawbar on my tractor. It is about 12" off the ground, 3-4" lower than tongue height would be on my trailers for level. Looking for an off-set drawbar for my model (M7060) - I could find nothing for a simple off-set bar. Only a bolt-on hammer strap that would raise it 3" And that was very pricey. So I had my local fab shop bend a piece of 1-1/2 X 2-1/2 cold-rolled bar for an offset of 4" and drill two holes. I was a bit concerned that the cold-rolled steel is not as strong as OEM draw bar, as I believe those are an alloy steel, not mild steel. So I added a section that used a second hole and pin. Hopefully that will resist any tendency for tongue weight to bend the bar down.



 

 

 

First test of the new offset draw bar. So far so good. Gross weight of full trailer is about 14,000lbs. Unsure of tongue weight. Maybe 1,000-1,500 lbs?



 

 

[Gary_C]

That looks pretty sweet. What model is that?

45xp

What do the consumables cost for that machine?
I assume you always have an air compressor nearby but did you consider one with a built in air compressor?

I always hear about the high cost of consumables. Any answers for these questions?

[Walnut Beast]

That looks pretty sweet. What model is that?

45xp

What do the consumables cost for that machine?
I assume you always have an air compressor nearby but did you consider one with a built in air compressor?

Yes you need a pretty good air compressor and clean regulated air to run the unit. The self contained air compressor like the one Hypatherm has is a great unit for portability but it's not as good as performance to comparable machine that uses the air compressor. The consumables last quite a long time. When cut quality goes down then you know. To change all the consumables in the torch is about 40 bucks. Better prices on bigger consumable packs and kits. The torch consumables consists of a swirl ring, nozzle, electrode, and drag tip. The electrode is the main one that goes first and they are 13 bucks. The Hypatherm I have pictured has a internal air filter in the machine but it's really recommended to have additional. The filter I have is the one Hypatherm has and is a really good one it's got a visual green dot on top to see filter is good and a auto drain on it. They are about 210 bucks. Your air flow needs to be around min. 85 psi constant when cutting. If you don't have adequate air supply the machine will shut down. I'll post some pictures of the consumables later.

[mike_belben]

I havent bought any in a long time but hypertherm had the most economical consumables and they lasted a long time.  Miller was terrible service life and very very high causing my dads machine to almost never get used anymore. 


  I had to cut up ~1200 m4 rifles around 2013 (?) With a hypertherm powermax 1000 thanks to an ATF decision.  I was able to double or maybe triple consumable life by reworking fouled tips.  That was literally all i did for about 11hours a day all month, sever painted aluminum into a water tank catching the slag,  that got so hot it steamed up my lense.  I was soaking my gloves in water to keep them from catching fire.

Filled a coffee can worth of consumables by the end.  Cost the company quite a lot. 

[barbender]

What a shame!