Flux Core Welding and Fabrication Tips - Target Stands

hey guys my name is Brandon and today we've got a real fun welding project stick around good afternoon guys welcome back today we've got a flex coal welding project that we're going to be working on if you guys are new here I want to thank you guys for stopping by my channel there's a new welding video every Friday maybe consider giving it a like or subscribe now further ado let's get going right so here's the next project we're gonna build and what these are is these are an adjustable width target stand and what you do is you put strapping like wood strapping down inside this this is rectangular tube then you snug down this little set screw and then attach a target to it whether it's you know it could be anything could be silhouette targets could be round targets could be something that you drew these right here are gonna get like a nail that you can put into the ground to keep these from tipping over and again like I said this is adjustable in width so this is gonna be square tube that opens and closes and I'm building a few of these for somebody I'm gonna build as many as I can out of the metal that I have and what I'll probably do is I'll probably just end up selling them all because it's not really cost-effective for me just to buy enough material to build four or six of these I just buy full lengths and then I'll just cut it up and build as many of these as I can and then just sell them so I need to build six of these target stands but what I'm gonna do just because I'm kind of making this up a little bit as I go is I'm gonna build one completely and then I'll have all my measurements and I can make sure everything works just right and then I'll start doing like production cutting I'll cut you know as many pieces of one thing that I can cut and then move on to the next now I'll tell you what this evolution 14 inch carbide saw makes doing this a breeze if you guys have never used one of these types of tools I'm telling you it is just it's extremely fun to use if you've ever used a wood chop saw it's just like that the only difference is is you're cutting metal with it it is extremely accurate your cuts are extremely straight in their burr free and there's no heat we got that cut and we got that cut for each side now we're gonna cut the spreader piece not the one that goes over this tube but we're going to cut this tube right here the one that goes inside of this one and I'm using 8 inch wall thickness by one and a quarter square - I'm cutting it 15 inches long [Applause] all right so that's that piece there and that'll make one side assembly so that'll be welded there and there now we need the piece that fits over this and that's this here and this tube here is inch and a half tube by 14 gauge so here are the basic components so when it's closed up completely it is approximately 18 inches could be narrower if you wanted it to be but that seems like a good way you can make this go as wide as 26 inches 2 foot would be a decent width so what I've got left to do now is I got to drill a hole here so we can have a bolt with a set screw to lock these two pieces together so that's kind of mean drilling of this and welding a nut to it we got to do the same thing here because we're gonna have a set screw here to hold the strapping into this tube same thing on this side and we got holes we got a drill in the end of this angle iron so it can be driven down into the ground so I've gone through and I've Center punched all my holes and then what I do with the drill bit is I make a little dimple in that Center punch and the center punch keeps the drill bit from wandering off or skipping once I get that little dimple created then I put a little drop of cutting fluid in as you can see right there and then I finish drilling the hole here's our parts list each of these are 15 inches long all the holes that you've seen are drilled three quarters of an inch in from the end and the diameter is 20 5/64 this is inch and a half angle by eighth inch and this is one by three tube same thing for the holes this is eight inches long the holes are in three quarters from the end let's get to or someone it's pretty hot in the shop today guys so this is gonna be a good project for flux core the reason I say that is I'm gonna be turning on my fans and with fans it can have a tendency to blow away your coverage gas just a better process I think for this so right now we're tooled up with solid wire so the last thing I had been doing was MIG so you want to do is cut the little ball off the end of your solid wire and then take your tip off that way when we feed the new wire and it'll just make it easier now we can go back to the spool on the machine and pull our wire right through the gun so with our contact tip removed now we can just feed the wire back through the gun in the liner make sure you hold it on to the wire it stinks when you lose it and it starts down coil this I'm using mathiesen 30 thousandths wire but before we go any further we got to switch around these electrical connections it had solid wire on it so you see this wire that comes up off the drive roll it's going to the positive side well for flux coil wire the wire that comes off the drive roll needs to go to the negative so we got to swap these wires around and for that reason I keep a nut driver that fits these nuts specifically for this machine right inside the cabinet down below I just keep it down in there it doesn't get in the way of anything and it just it's always here when I need it [Music] now that we got the Machine correctly wired now we got to flip around our drive roll one side of this drive role is knurled which is right here the other side which is here is smooth we need to flip this around because the knurled side is four flex four yeah so now that's ready because this was kinked around I like to just cut it and make a nice fresh clean end on the wire I think it just feeds and goes through the liner a lot better here we go now that it started just make sure the wire is down in that groove then you can put down your tensioning system together then just turn it on and pull the trigger now it's time to set up our machine and I'm we're welding steel we're using flux core and it says there's no shielding gas required I'm using 30,000 wire and we're gonna call it eight inch metal that we're welding which is pretty close to 12 gauge and the starting settings are three and forty four what we want to do so it's probably gonna hover around three and forty three and forty five somewhere between there because that's where eight inch metal falls is somewhere between here so I set it for three and forty and we'll go from there so we're three and forty we're good let's get going I'm really liking my new welding fabrication table if you haven't seen this video where I debuted it I'll put a link up above but as you can see while I'm sitting here it allows me to put my whole lower part of the body underneath the table it's just super convenient and because I cut these pieces using the metal cutting chop saw the ends are all straight plumb and parallel and clean so all I got to do is just set the pieces down and clamp them together and then I just verify it with my square to make sure that everything is accurate then just tack it all together it just makes setup and layout and getting everything fit up so much quicker I like these settings right where they are guys this is perfect once I get these pads I'll bring you in each hour dear and as always if you want to know where I get my plasma cutter my welder is my metal cutting chop saw even my chipping hammer in this lift table degree Bend now remember guys we never weld everything out completely until we know that everything is is perfect so it's got a couple quick tacks on there and then that will fully get welded on that seam and a little quick tack there and same thing on the bottom just a nice quick tack there won't be any weld on the bottom that's just to hold it right now while we get everything the way we need it and you see how that slide so while I have this piece here the last piece to tack would be to put the nut on to this that will have a nut well to dare and then so that'll be the next phase of our project let's do that what I did guys I just threaded a bolt down through that nut so that I know that the nut is centered over the hole and that bolt will allow that to happen that way I know it's right when it gets welded so the settings were real consistent for everything on this project except for welding on these nuts because it's such a small piece of material that as you go welding all the way around the nut that eventually the nut will get red-hot so to compensate from that I just backed off my settings a little bit and everything worked just perfect now you can see here that I do not have a MIG nozzle on the gun now the reason for that is that it's not needed because there's no shielding gas that's what the purpose of the nozzle is is to direct the gas out the end of the nozzle but the issue is is that when you don't have the nozzle on it that when you pull the trigger that that whole assembly that's sticking out of the front can become electrified so you want to be careful you don't want to touch your contact tip or any part of that metal body against the metal because it will arc out and short out so if you're not used to doing a lot of flux co welding I would recommend getting a they make a plastic nozzle it looks just like the brass one I think it's brass that comes with a MIG gun but it just slips on in its place and it's non conductive and it's made of like a plastic or some sort of thermal type material and there we are guys everything is all tacked together now we can weld out everything so we're gonna weld it here and here I'll bring in a little bit closer when I do all the welding got the nuts tacked on nut tack there there you can see how the two fit inside of one the other so that's about as far as you'd want to go right there you wouldn't need to go any further now that's massive you know and if you picture like a couple pieces of strapping coming up you know maybe five or six feet tall and then you staple some cardboard to the face of that and then you put on your paper target on top of the cardboard so if the wind was blowing it could tip all this over because there's a lot of surface area for the wind to push again so all you have to do is just take like a long nail or even a tent stake and drive it in at an angle and that'll help hold this whole thing all down if it was real windy oh so next thing what I do is we're gonna weld everything out then we'll deburr everything we'll run a flap disc over all of it so as I said in the beginning the reason I'm using flux coil wire for this project is that it's real hot in the shop right now and I've got a lot of fans that are blowing on me so what happens is is that the fans or even the air if you're working outside will actually blow away the coverage gas in the c25 or argon mixture gas is what shields the weld puddle from the atmosphere so if your fans or the outside wind is blowing away your coverage gas then your weld is gonna have porosity it's just not gonna look good and it's not gonna be a sound weld so you can compensate for that by using flux coil wire and just as it says it has an inner core that shields the well puddle so if you're working outside or you're working in a windy environment flux coal wire is really the ideal thing to use I mean you can do what's called dual shield which is like a self shielding flux coil wire and you're using a shielded gas as well that works really well but there's a little bit of extra setup and process to that you got to put you know a little tense around it to prevent the coverage gas from getting blown away well this isn't a structural project so this really doesn't matter so just a simple self shielded flux coal wire is gonna be perfect for this like I said I am working indoors but it's really hot and I have the fans blowing so that's gonna blow all my coverage gas away unless I put up some sort of blockade to prevent that from happening and it's just not necessary here but as you can see with self shielded or flux coil wire that there is a little bit of extra work to it you have to scrape off the slag or the shielding you have to scrape up the BBS there are a little bb's that are present you got to do wire brushing it's a little bit dirty or a process then it would be if you using solid wire and c25 gas but all at all this is the ideal situation for what we're doing here and again a lot of you guys don't have a MIG welder with c25 gas and in my opinion you can do just as good of a job by using some quality wire and using a self shielded or flux cool process for here I'm using Matheson 30,000 wire I just really like it run smooth and I've had real good luck with it in fact this is the same exact wire that I built the entire pile trailer with now if you haven't seen that episode I'll put a link up above I've compiled all those individual episodes into one long episode it's like an hour and a half long but if you haven't seen it I think it's a pretty interesting video of turning something that is a complete piece of pile of junk into something that is pretty nice and functional I'm actually pretty proud of that trailer so now I'm just going through with a 120 grit flap disc in D burn everything and there we are we're all welded out and I even round it off the corners just with a flap disc just so we didn't have any sharp edges that way it makes it look better another thing you got to do which I did here is just chase out the threads with the tap and this is a 3/8 torch tap and just threaded it all the way in all the way down that way you know your hardware isn't gonna give you a problem when you go to screw it in just like that now for hardware I'm using stainless stainless steel bolts 3/8 coarse thread a couple ways you could do this you could use stainless hardware you could use regular bolts and weld a piece of round dowel across the top so it makes a handle but I'm not gonna do that I'm just gonna use regular 3/8 hardware it's got a nice wide slot in the head so that if you wanted you could use a screwdriver you can even use a coin too to tighten it down one less thing to get cranked down on if you put you know you put a big handle on it someone's gonna brief in it down and it's probably really not necessary so throw a little bit of paint on this and these will be good to go see those bolts just cinch down the wood that gets slid in there makes for a nice tight fit and it's all adjustable you don't really need to go that tight hand tight it's funny it's not gonna go anywhere yeah so that's all there is to it guys super-fun project I like doing stuff like this fabricating stuff and building stuff from scratch it's just a whole lot of fun guys want to know about all the tools that I'm using I'll have links down below in the description as well down in the comment section if you guys wondering what I'm working on before it even makes it up to YouTube you guys can catch me on Facebook and on Instagram I'll have links down in the description and that's all there is to it guys I want to thank you for watching thank you guys for tuning in if this is something that you like please don't forget to rate comment and subscribe new videos every Friday until next week I'll see you then stay safe take care bye [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Brandon Lund

Views: 52,068

Rating: 4.9529719 out of 5

Keywords: Welding Metal Fabrication Steel Steel Fabrication Metal Welding Mig Welding, welding, flux core welding, flux core welding tips, fabrication, fabrication tips, metal fabrication, how to weld, learn how to weld, how to, diy, flux core, mig welding, welder, Flux Core Welding and Fabrication Tips, target stands, target stands homemade, tools, educational, welding with flux core, self shielded flux core, self shielded flux core welding, welding projects, brandon lund, do it yourself

Id: xXxWz6wCCWQ

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019