Looks like a fun bike and it's getting well used now. I just took a Supermoto riding school recently and it's stupid fun. ridiculous lean angles on asphalt then transition to dirt, take a couple jumps, rear of the bike squirming all over the place, back to asphalt and looking for grip with dirty tires.. was a real hoot. I could see getting into that.

Oh and thanks for the brass vice jaw cap suggestion guys, I'll probably make something like that :)

-Ryan

Question for those who are familiar with AC TIG welding..
I took some classes and have been practicing TIG, just switched from steel to aluminum today, and now that I'm welding on AC I keep getting a small zap/shock through the table into my arm/hand - whatever is touching the table - right when I light the arc up. I'm wearing a long sleeve cotton shirt. Googling a bit turned up suggestions to ground the table to something but it's not my shop/space so DIY solutions aren't so much an option. Am I doing something wrong or is this common?
It doesn't seem to happen through the leather gloves, so I'm thinking leather sleeves could solve the issue for me..

-Ryan

Yes. It's common. For me anyways, i've always gotten it.

Solution is to wear some gloves / better insulate yourself from the table.

I try not to touch the table/work piece with my off hand until the arc is started and its time to add filler. But I normally only get zapped when I arc tungsten to filler (oops), or if the ground is shitty.

Try welding in the summer, in a 90+ °F garage. That'll help.

Remember, you can't have a fan blowing on you because that'll blow away the argon.

The zaps sometimes noticeably change my mood. Like...for a few minutes I think the world is going to end.

Welding AC current triggers my front lawn sprinklers. I have to unplug my timer box whenever I weld aluminum at home.

Hahaha wish there was a "like" button for posts, this would get it :)
Thanks for the input guys, It's only beeen a nuissance nothing more, I was just concerned I may be doing something wrong and not knowing it.

Going back today to weld up all the changes to my intercooler. Nervous yet excited.

-Ryan

Pre heat that bastard. I wish I did mine. The 2nd half of the weld on mine when it was already super hot looks way better than the first half when it was cold.

I have to unplug my coffee grinder for the same reason. First time messing with aluminum, the next morning I found that it had ground all the beans that I had in there.

Give a prop then.

Oh is that what that props thing is? I'm a :noob: hahaha

Mazdaspeed3 motor in a lotus7 clone. I think the counts as some custom fabrication. Corky has been working on it for a while.
Attachment 239275

Why is the BOV like that?

Because race car.

I assume also because tiny engine bay.

Im going to route my BOV into the interior of the car so it blows off in my face like a turbocharged cumshot.

You just made my week.

Route EWG dump into anus and BOV into mouth, DP win.

When that oil seal blows be prepared for HIV incoming.

It was a fitment issue. Tiny engine bay in 7 replicas, so you dit things where you can.

This is the best!

All of the guys at home welding and having crazy crazy electrical issues.

Your welding machines likely have a spare ground in the back (above and beyond the wall plug) you need to run a wire from your welder to a grounding rod (can be a small one) that you jam in the ground outside of your garage. this will get rid of all electrical interference.

I was getting a "whomp" through my stereo I use while I was welding just through the high-frequency start and once I added the HF grounding loop it went away.

I I tried out rare earth tungsten yesterday on the synchrowave at school. I wasnt terribly happy with it. I had good gas coverage and even with a clean tungsten the arc was all like, fuck you I'm just going to go in a circle about 3/8" in diameter. And it literally just went in a circle, round and round and round. I did kind of end up with a blobby ball on the end because I was using 3/32nd tungsten at 175 amps with a #8 cup. I was considering 1/8" tungsten but we only had thoriated in that size and I really wanted to check out the hype from this rare earth stuff. Not impressed, weld came out ok though and the tungsten didnt split down the middle like the thoriated probably would have at that size/amperage combo with A/C.

I notice that happen when the weldment is too heavy for the amperage.

if your welding say 3/8-1/2" aluminum with 175A and your "welding" with no filler waiting for it to heat up the arc wanders.

The blobby ball your talking about makes me think your A/C balance was too low (cleaning) and it was causing the arc to wander because its heating the tungsten up too much.


If your limited to 3/32" tungsten, welding AC and need to keep that A/C balance to keep a good weld, try lowering the frequency into the ~60hz range with no pulse and if your welding heavy material you will need to pre-heat it with a torch.
High frequency makes cool noises but its hard on tungsten. 60hz is about the frequency that the old transformers use and will actually help get good penetration compared to 100+ if your having tungsten issues at the expense of a wider bead.

Preheat lets you weld with lower amperage and the tungsten will keep its form too.


I haven't had the chance to play with arc form modifiers like some of the high end units have, but im sure if you fucked that up (like some people do for jokes at a school) you could really have some issues.

That was a transformer machine running at 60hz. I was using like 45 as the balance because I completely forgot what to set it to, probably should have gone to more like 60. I was literally welding billets together. Once the part was hot the weld was a lot nicer but the arc still wanted to just move in a circle, not a random pattern in a circle shape, a circle, spinning around. I wish I could have pre-heated but I didnt have a clean stainless brush, and my only choice of a heat source was acetylene O2 tank was empty to so it would have been soot city.

ok. wasn't sure about the miller tig machine and what it was.

40 is waaay low. 55-60 is as low as you ever need to go. welding a clean billet you can probably go as high as 80%. it will reduce the etch zone and being a clean billet you wont be pulling much crap through...that will make it weld a lot hotter in the part too, so you will throttle back a lot compared to 45% LOL. Oh, and your tungsten wont turn into a piece of shit.


basically the welding issue here is welder setup and not the tungsten. you would have been really pissed regardless of the tungsten with that setup.

Did the tungsten ball so hard that it dropped off in a molten ball into the aluminum? I had that happen when I was learning to weld the stuff. had to drill a 3/4" hole in the part and weld it shut because of the contamination issue that caused.

to everyone: don't be afraid to grab some scrap and fuck with welder settings. Pay attention to what your doing though or its pointless practice.


Remember what works and what doesn't and you will be able to troubleshoot issues like being discussed.


Here is the beginning of a one off oil pan for a Miata fe3.
https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2932/...919b21d26d.jpg
Fe3 miata oil pan by HellaFab, on Flickr

just a bit more work contouring the bottom half to closely match the Miata subframe so the wings allow for maximum oil capacity without negative ground clearance compared to the rest of the drivetrain. I wont be making any more of these.

I saw the tungsten ball starting to fall off or look liquidlyish at one point and I quickly pulled off the pedal. I think that might have been when I really wasnt paying attention to the settings at all and had left the balance in the highlighted range which was like 20% for some reason. No idea why it was highlighted special on the knobs. Having the diversion that just has amperage adjustment and a button to switch between DC and AC with decent settings for both made me forget everything about setting up the welder.

You should watch this, funny he just posted it. This guy is pretty darn knowledgeable and got a great list of videos:

As someone who has used 2% ceriated (grey) on countless aluminum jobs i will say that welding with that big monkey fist is something you just get used to. At home i use the e3 stuff just because i found it to work best on stainless.

But as far as AC welding, getting that good round ball on there and pulling the tungsten back into the cup has always worked just fine for me. That's on a 30 year old tig machine too. I just took my time getting things warmed up and just dab dab dab get my shit going and move along. It has always turned out fine for me... You can go back even in this thread to see what me and other coworkers have done butchering aluminum.

I guess I was using the off brand of E3 since it was purple paint. Container said rare earth. Didnt pancake for me, just made the monkey fist if I held it at 175 amps for a while. Though after one grind it ended up with the nodules sticking out everywhere. Whatever, for was I was doing just pointing the heat in the general direction, dabbing the filler where I wanted it to go and praying generally worked.

At home I use 2% thoriated for everything, I just have problems with it cracking down the middle when on A/C, its very bizarre.

How are you grinding it? They do crack easy depending on the method of grinding which shows up as soon as you start welding.

thoriated is shit for ac. always cracks eventually.

The e3 tungsten I use is purple too. works great up to 200A in 3/16". that's what I used for the oil pan flange in the picture above. besides burning the shit out of my hand with the radiant heat, there was no problems with the weldment.

First attempt at making a collector today for a miata I don't have yet.. :vash:

Used a bandsaw for cuts.. Came out ok fit was less than perfect

What is your welding setup for that?


amps, gas flow rate, and cup size/type

it looks like the amperage is more or less right, but there wasn't enough shielding gas and/or the material wasn't cleaned well before welding.

Was using 50-70 amps, gas lens #8 cup flowing 20-25 argon, thoriated tungsten.

Used a fresh flap disk to deburr the edges and cleaned it with a lot of acetone..

My fitment was terrible on the two half's so I had to use more filler than I would of liked

I plan on making another one, this was just to get my feet wet and figure out my angles and make sure my jig was good

What filler did you use? The weld looks like that time I thought I was welding mild steel and it turned out to be stainless.

I feel your pain. Best of luck with your oil pan. The most difficult thing I made is my oil pan. I did steel because I end up using the pan as a ramp across the subframe when I install the engine.

It's parallel with the subframe once the trans is on the cross member. 4 quart sump. plus the filter & cooler is 6 quarts.

http://www.absurdflow.com/miata/klde/oilpan6.jpg

http://www.absurdflow.com/miata/klde/oilpan7.jpg

completely clean your weld piece within what would be the heat affected zone at a bare minimum.

I use a stainless wire wheel before I cut the angles into the collector.

You will be able to get more tips with a clean weld than welding with dirty material.

That being said, something is up with your setup or welding technique. it should be clean looking with the setup you describe but its showing a lot of grey.

Try cleaning the material and watch your torch angle.

50amps is pretty low for schedule 10. definitely run 70-80. You will notice you can run more amps in the narrow parts of the collector because there is more material there to work. you can probably up the amperage to about 90-100 in those areas.

Yeah, looks like my welds because I rarely clean (besides a quick wipe with non cloro brake cleaner) and I use the same grinding wheel and wire wheel on everything.

Using 309L

I welded up the inside after welding the outside, because the gap was atleast 1/8" so I'd say that had a major role in the outside weld looking like it does..

I just started welding a couple months ago so I'm still learning, this was my first time welding on stainless

Thanks for the advice

use 308 filler on stainless to stainless.

:noob:= me

I have both 309/308 and misread the Lincoln site for 304 to 304

Some recent projects.
Installed individual EGT bungs in Sticks (Matt) header.
Attachment 184895
Attachment 184896
This is how I did my pre-turbo water injection.
Attachment 184897
I took the S-bend out of my intake. That was good for 14 more hp.
Attachment 184898

Diy square top. Love it.

Is the pre turbo WI an Aero profile?

wait wait wait... what is the benefit to pre-turbo meth? Doesnt that eat up the turbo?

Wet compression is wicked efficient for charge cooling. It can erode the compressor wheel, but we're not talking about chewing up a compressor wheel a week. We're talking a little visible surface finish damage over the life of the turbo.

Just don't use water if you have an efficient intercooler. If you are using a really effective intercooler or it's really cool out it can condense back to a liquid and pool inside it.

well I was looking at injection for my poopra, and the way my intake charge piping is, is 1980's retarded by leaving the turbo, down into the intercooler, then back up the hot side, and over the motor into the intake and i am not ready to buy a front-facing intake manifold; nor do I want to go through the effort of making a injection system for the charge piping before the throttle body, or intake manifold if im just going to swap it out in the future.

This might be my best option for water injection. Would it be safe to mix a 60/40 water/meth mix, or any methanol for pre-turbo injection, or is meth most beneficial for intake manifold direct injection?

In my case the intercooler is an older FM one, probably not the greatest. A lot of guys run pre-turbo on their rotaries with good long term results. I don't remember the nozzle size, but I'm sure it's conservitave. Current theory says that if you have enough injector you run little to none of the meth/alcohol as the water is the prime reactor for removing the heat from the air.

If/when I switch to flex-fuel I assume this would no longer be necessary. Somebody else chime in on if this true or not.

For a different kind of fabrication I wish I could share some of the images from the lab I am in. We work in nanoscale physics research so get to do a different type of fabrication. For instance in one of the projects we are measuring signals from a .7 nm thick layer, which for comparison the size of an atom is around .1 nm or so.

I can probably share this crappy image I took with a damaged SEM. The bright spots are a 2 nm thick of platinum. Usually we try to make as uniform layers as possible but I was testing something where a lot of pinholes in the layer was desired.

Attachment 184894

Angstroms good sir and fix your stigmation. What lab do you work in?

I am in the Krivorotov group at UCI. Someone from another group had crashed their sample into the pole piece and it hadn't been repaired yet so this was the best I could do. SEM time is difficult to get (notice the timestamp) so unless the image is going to be published I just get it good enough. Also there apparently was some issues with the immersion mode that was finally fixed today. The joys of shared user equipment...

Sounds like you have experience with this. From where?

I was an engineer in a nano fab facility for the last few years. Mainly doing chemical engineering.

I spent a lot of time on an fesem. Looks like you guys are working on some interesting stuff.

Which building do you work in? Are you a TA (I thought most PhD candidates were)? I majored in Biosci at UCI - three quarters of physics and labs were required. Seemed like a lot of those premed kids were speed junkies at that school to try and stay competitive - ever notice that? lol.

There was so much funding and new buildings after Rowland and Reines won the Nobel prize. Good times. I love that school.

I am in the basement of Reines Hall. Kind of an interesting place. The neighbors next door have a setup for liquifying Helium and further down the hallway is the machine shop followed by a nuclear reactor.

Luckily I only had to TA for a year here. I heard the premed here where awful but I had the engineering courses and was busy yelling at them for not being able to do simple calculus. When I did my masters at CSULB, I had premed in the classes I TAd. Constantly got told that they needed an A on whatever BS they turned in and usually replied pretty much with "cool story." I had someone with less than 10% expect to pass once and get super pissed at me. Also got yelled at for failing most of my class (and forced to raise the grades up) that was unable to calculate slope of a line or perform any form of basic math... even though they are in college and math was a prereq...

Me.. A in college Trig, D in Calc... wtf was I thinking taking that god-awful course during the summer?!
All I needed to know was how to make dilutions and calculate concentrations. Degree was in Microbio which basically turned to Mol Bio...
Now I make 4x as much as I did then fixing lab shit... true story bro.

Back on topic... pics of awesomeness?

Ok. Awesomeness for you.



Attachment 113443



Attachment 113444

Fe3 miata turbo custom intake manifold.

Just need to add throttle body flange, vac ports and throttle body cable provision.

My WG

https://scontent-b-lhr.xx.fbcdn.net/...66001077_o.jpg

Pneumatic solinoid?

Pneumatic cylinder controlled by AMS500