How to Build a Flat Welding Table. The lost footage found Retro Video

[Music] hi everyone jason here from fireball tool and i'm super excited about this upcoming project or let's just say problem that i'd like to solve and and it basically comes from you guys on the internet oh and from me too but so i'd like to read some of these uh these comments on uh the name of this this uh forum here um is how are you guys making welding tables at home getting them near flat right so that's the problem is we're faced with imperfect materials plate that might be bowed or even our stock our tubing isn't theoretically straight or flat and then of course you're building a welding table but you don't have something to start we don't have anything flat to start with right so i'd like to read some of these funny comments to you right so the question is how are you guys making your welding tables at home and getting them there flat some of the guys say a good material start with good fit up right that always helps tack everything in place don't over weld it there may be plans on shimming or clamping and other guys are saying frankly it's just not going to happen so he's giving this guy a realistic goal some guys saying start from loose tubing on the garage four will result in a failure and you're probably right another one says sounds like you need to find someone with a flat table and bring it over to them to weld your steel frame to i have a problem with that too how do you know your buddy has a flat his table is flat that's a problem so the other ones are if you're trying to achieve something greater than or less than three thirty thousands you're like searching for the holy grail virtually making it's non-existent well and i agree with a lot of these and then other people say just weld together and have it blanchard ground or have a secondary process done to it to get it into its flatness well and i would agree with that too but it can be inexpensive or maybe you're you live in a place where there's just not access to any of those uh facilities that would do that for you so what we're forced with is to live with something that's unflat or buy something right and there's a lot of flat tables out there that are that claim to be flat i don't know but so i would like to i have a couple ideas on how i'd like to solve this problem and i'd like to do it with all the tools i have in this shop so no fancy lasers what i mean by fancy laser i mean fancy surface laser i'm talking in the tens of thousands of dollars that can measure a surface i want to use tools that i can find readily off the shelf or order maybe online and keep the cost very low okay and something you can do in your home shop or garage i could show up with a box just like this with some tools and literally we could build a table that's flat so let's define flat okay is flat a surface like this the milling machine flat is flat a defined as a plate well that's a big question mark right so i have access to a strong hand welding table just down the street in a very nice machine shop that the owner has allowed me to dissect it so let's set the benchmark let's see what that table actually measures and that will give us a goal and see if we can beat it so let's go check it out so i want to show you the finish table of what i end up doing now i'm going to do this because i don't want you guys to get lost through the build and you're going to be wondering why did jason do that why did jason do this i think it's easier if you guys see the finished table i'll just show you some of the features and why we did what we did and then we'll also the video will also be how i did it okay so let's take a look okay so we stuck with the normal the three by four table and as you can see i went crazy on the on the color if the color is what is the color the color is bentley blue and candy red is what it ended up being kind of flashy for a welding table sure and so as you can see by looking at it the plates here this is a 10 by 10 plate with 5 8 holes they've been laser cut into it we'll get more in detail on that okay but let's go over some of the features like you guys know that i get carried away with my projects it just can't be a normal table we have to make it difficult right so of course as you can see we got a air of our hydraulic cylinder underneath so this baby goes up and down pretty cool right because you got to be comfortable as your welding of course so adjustable pins over here adjustable pins adjustable feet and of course check this out we have adjustable top okay this is this is the magic right here okay so as you can see man how did you in the heck do you get 12 plates lined up not only lined up but flat right that's the challenge and then what'd you say jason you're gonna do it with those little tools that are in that little cardboard box yep that's what we're gonna do okay all right one of the unique features that you guys saw when we tested the strong hand table was the strong hand left the plates only an inch off this off the frame to me i think that's too shallow because i like to use the clamps i already have available to me so this is a three inch spacing off the frame with a two inch gap that way i can use all my existing clamps and get all the way underneath there and not interfere with the frame so that's one design that i like so that's what sets the height of these plates i know it looks unconventional but it actually is designed on purpose and two the supports if you've noticed there's lots of supports running through here so we saw that there were a sag and a strong hand table well hopefully this one will not sag and even with the hydraulic cylinders in the center with it locked it will also help with sag over time so that's another cool design feature and these holes are 5 8 so that you can use standard strong hand tooling or future tooling whatever i decide to do or you decide to do it's not necessary but because i had the opportunity to do it i did it all right everyone so i want to show you what i want to show you the flux capacitor and what makes time travel possible i mean i want to show you fireball's new tool okay this is actually what makes the table accurate okay is these adjustment bolts okay so what i wanted to do for you guys is make it easy for you to accomplish this so it's something you can actually purchase and there's other ways around it we'll get in to a little more detail but this is the this is the principle and the theory on how these work okay so you have a adjustment part okay but we know that whatever you welded together the framework isn't going to necessarily be flat okay so in order to take up that adjustment we need an adjustable shim okay so what we do is we have this adjustable shim we thread on a nut this is a locking nut and then we're able to now clamp because if you look inside there there's a hole now you're able to bolt the plate down through the center of the fastener no welding involved because as soon as you weld all your accuracies out the window gone so we cannot weld the top to the frame that's problem number one okay two we need to be able to adjust it and you're gonna say that's all good jase i understand we need to shim the top but you're wondering to yourself how in the heck are you gonna do this how are you gonna line up all these studs and get them perfectly flat right well that's the challenge so that's what's next all right so i know you're already thinking oh man does jason have the plans for this table already i know yes i do these are available for download at fireballtool.com go to the website for a small fee you can have the plans i give you cut lists dimensions part numbers everything to build this table or a variant of it i want that's the beauty of selling the studs is now you guys have ultimate control over whatever surface you guys want it may not necessarily be plates like what i have here it may just be a flat surface or use your creativity and do whatever you want but this is one of the key components to this build and this could be substituted with something else but i highly i don't recommend it but this just makes it easy for you okay so the plans are available fireballtool.com okay so you guys now saw a little general overview of the table and saw what i did now let's actually go build it and you guys can follow along i'm warning you this is going to be a long video so stop grab some popcorn and let's get to building this thing [Music] foreign so so if you have a saw that's able to cut two tubes at a time it really helps with cutting 45s that are exactly the same length and a little more accurate that way well i wanted to add a little challenge i wanted to do this whole build on sawhorses i don't think it'd be fair if i built it on my welding table so everything's gonna be built on saw horses for anybody's that that's interested in the welder settings and what gas i use i like it cranked man [Applause] [Music] once again we're using the speed square here to show you the test as you can see once you get it square it's kind of hard to hold it in position and secondly it's hard to test the roll and even if i were to take the roll out i have no way to hold it it's kind of a pain in the butt so i think there's a better tool out there to use than that all right guys so i want to show you what happens if you don't use the tabs and why these things are an awesome accessory so i'm going to bring in clothes to show you so as you can see my cuts look pretty good as far as the angle and i don't want you guys to rely on your cut angles because i've had cut angles where you're welding a quarter inch gap out here to nothing when it's square so never rely on your your cut geometry unless you for some reason you know it's perfect but never assume so that's why we're using this so as you can tell when i put it in here it's uh let me get you guys in here a little closer even so here we go so when i get you in close here's what happens when you don't use the tabs so say you it's square right [Applause] readjust [Music] here's the problem do you see this this motion right here you have up you have no control of where this is and you can see i can tip the tube and alter the geometry of how these tubes line up so that's where those tabs index those the surface right here so you can actually introduce roll into your tube by not using the the tabs so there's other squares out there that don't provide any of this where that's where these come in handy okay we flipped the tabs around flipped the square over and i'm using the aluminum one because i'm off the welding table and it's just super light it's really easy to work with so this is my square of choice when doing something like this so as you can tell now the square cannot move from from where it is it is literally kind of dummy proof so you can literally just butt it in there line your your uh corners up with your finger or diagonal whatever you want to do and clamp away so and then don't don't worry about having to recheck that it's square just clamp and go [Music] the other nice thing is when you release your clamps i can physically check to see did it stay square well look at that it's it hasn't moved there's no teeter totter in there whatsoever so it's a good visual for me to not have to come back and recheck to see did this thing move after i welded it unlike a speed square and after you tacked it you got to come back and recheck well it's already here so it's faster all right i want to show you this we've got our two nineties that we just prefabbed together and we know those are good and we're gonna start combining here and you can see i'm still working off three points uh check out one of my earlier videos on the theory behind that three points make a perfect plane and since i'm not welding on a welding table that i know is flat this is the next best thing so work off three points and now we're going to use the mini square to align these corners back up this is where it really comes in handy if you have two or more of these squares as you can see this this little square doesn't quite have the power or i'll take that back the clamps don't have the power to hold the tube to the square so there needs to be a second one in the other corner over there so pretty easy uh remedy there okay now you saw me build this off the welding table so we just bring it over to this welding table to reference just to see is it flat there is virtually no teeter-totter into this for building this thing off the welding table i am extremely happy you can achieve quite a bit if you just kind of put your mind to it and use the proper tool so as you can see it's square and flat that's where we want to start with and now that's all tacked together now we can use this frame to build all our other stuff so we'll sand the tops of the tacks down and now we can lay grids in through here and we'll build off of this [Music] all right everyone we're back so here's what i got so far i used the squares as i did previously and got them all laid out and squared up this way and in line so now we're come to the very last one and so we run into a problem right so there's two ways we could have done this coming to the last one to get that measurement it doesn't fit we could have come back before with the square and ran a scribe up it and just leveled it by eye to the scribe or i just physically just clamp the mega square to the tube um because i need something to hold it there anyway as i weld it so it doesn't twist but it gives me that roll also because it's indicated off this top surface right here so it kind of kills two birds with one stone so that's how i got away with with doing this on the very end one you could square it up using the inside corner and then the magi or the monster square same thing it's basically there holding that part in place so that when i weld it it is indicated off the tabs off the top just took two clamps so i know that it's square to the world and everything's all legit so now when i go through here and i tack and i weld i know it's not going to twist or move or pull on me so that's kind of and these tubes are to reference the tops of the tubes so that everything are in line that's the people do that all the time with gates and handrail nothing special there so that's just kind of where i'm at so i'm going to keep you updated on the next step here [Music] please uh uh all right pay close attention here this is the most critical part of the whole build is standing these uh square tube posts up here as you just saw i gave up on that framing square because it hit right in the roll of the uh tubes and it's because those two tubes are offset it was extremely difficult to get a good alignment with it it's basically worthless in this application where the mega square here is nice and wide so i can purchase on split the difference of the square and still use it and you can see how fast it is i just set it up clamp it i didn't level the frame i didn't do anything just clamp and go okay this is another also great feature of these tools is that when you're actually ready to weld and you do weld the part stays where you wanted it to that's number one most important is you don't have the weld distortion so to save myself some some comments i decided to do one post the old-fashioned way which is use a level and so in order to do the old-fashioned way you have to level the whole frame so this took realistically 10 minutes to put this one post in it's kind of ridiculous right and then at the end it still wasn't right like the other three it was still off a little bit and it came back to bite me in the butt in the end of the build it i should have broke my tacks loose and moved it over that 16 of an inch because this is very critical these have to be perfect so do not skimp on this step okay so coming up here is the problem when you get ready to tack with this method there's nothing really to hold it i probably should have clamped some spreader bars across from the top of the legs it's there's nothing there's nothing there's no support so as soon as i tack it it moves and therefore you're having to hit it around and you're moving tacks around and then by the time it did cool it was uh it pulled on me in the end 16th of an inch after the weld's cooled down pain in the butt so get yourself the right tools and do it right all right everyone you just saw me level this one post the old fashioned way with the level and then level the table up so it's we have a a reference point right so i know you're thinking go back and check the ones you did with your squares how close are you right see look it i'm even still messing around with this back and forth get trying to get the level right you guys know what i'm talking about right here's the one i just did with the square pretty dang good okay it's the one i just did with the square right [Applause] square [Applause] look at my hands are up here i'm not pushing nothing i'm saying that's pretty dang good for just clamping and going but i just want to prove the uh they got the squares are the definitely the fastest way to go and i didn't even have to level the base so on to the next step so here i'm just laying out for the holes to be drilled and these holes are for the pins that go into the tubes of the leg and that's what stops the table from falling down on you so very important and one of two ways i lay it out and did it in the drill press and then you'll see a little later on i use the milling machine just to show two different methods of doing this pretty handy tool here is a champion carbide tipped hole saw these come in every imaginable size possible and your welding supplier can provide these for you as you can see they drill pretty quick too all right pizza and chips for lunch here so but this is my preferred method using the annular cutter in the mill it makes the best hole so if you don't have any annular cutters for your milling machine you definitely got to snag some of these babies so here's all the holes all done and uh some of you might be thinking how come i didn't drill a hole in the opposite uh the female side of the receiver tube to accommodate that and the answer is you do not want to hold a whole interference fit there because if you were to jack the jack up with the pins still in there you would bend the table so this way if it accidentally gets jacked up the table just goes up okay so that's why there's no opposing hole in the other tube so as you guys have probably noticed my preferred method of fabrication is to tack everything and that way it gives you the option to move or shift or change and then it also just strengthens the whole structure so that when you do go to final weld it's all kind of fighting each other so that's just my preferred method of doing it is tack everything first so okay this is just a reminder remember that the center isn't the center of the base plate is the center of the jack so just keep that in mind [Music] so this is the jack rod end and i was looking for a spacer it was an inch and a half and i'm like huh i remember something that's exactly an inch and a half and it actually worked out pretty good because it helped hold the the tabs with the part and in its right location so it worked out pretty sweet so we're working on the the leveling feet here so i'm just basically going to sandwich these bolts in between the plates those are going to be the feet and so i just have to thread it together and weld the nut so it's pretty easy [Music] [Music] all right everyone here we go we just pulled off the sawhorses and we're going to be testing its operation now that the whole thing's been welded out and cooled down i have installed the cylinder so we're going to see it go up and down under its own power i still got a little bit of welding left to do on a couple little places but nothing that's going to interfere with the obstruction of the machine so let's see it go up and down okay so there it is at its highest point and remember that the table top's going to be a number number another three inches taller than that so but i don't have the pins in the legs and checking for rigidity there's very little movement a little bit back and forth that's to be expected side to side there's a little none but when you drop it back on its pins that should pretty much be eliminated so let's see it go back down [Music] [Music] so i think that's a success so far so let's get the the next parts getting the the plates installed in the studs so let's talk about that next all right you guys i just want to show you my setup for doing these holes these chamfered holes in these plates i basically have a two ground parallels that i've indicated in uh to center the plates in the corner and then they get held down by this clamp i'll show you this clamp it a little more in depth here it's kind of neat uh when i first started machining here's what uh you get a box of this stuff and you're kind of have to figure out how to use them and you watch the guys on youtube and they stack the blocks on top of each other but you you want to get something tall well you got to start stacking these like legos on one two three blocks so being just thinking out of the box i just came up with this real quick just a piece of three quarter by six acme thread i just welded to a block on the bottom and i have an adjustment nut because the other problem i have with these things is it seems like i'm always going to be right here in the slot and it just does never just wants to sit so you always have to [ __ ] it go at a weird angle where this will hold down i can span the gaps i can turn it backwards get close get far just do whatever i want and have infinite height adjustment pretty quick uh this is just a piece of bar that i rolled in the roller um welded a a little sharp point to it and machined them flat and now it's done kind of little setup so i can move it in move it out this just stays together and see how it just kind of follows along so it's pretty fast so that's what i'm using to hold everything down i can reach here in the middle of the plate hold it down one clamp and off we go so the bit i'm using to drill these is this link center drill made in usa [Applause] 3 8 82 degree this is a three quarter shank 5 8 so it gets held in my 5 8 collet this will not fit in a normal drill press so you have to use the old method so let's do one uh so all right now is the time we're going to start putting these uh fixture plates on uh this fancy frame here but let me go over the plates with you a little bit haven't done that with you this is um the material is called strengths 700. and it is a structural steel plate they use it in cranes equipment and the properties are the material is very pure as it's held to high tolerances it's very flat it's weldable machinable and expensive but it is the best choice for this application this was all laser cut i opted to have the holes laser cut because my time is valuable sure i could have drilled every one of these holes on the milling machine but i just paid extra to have the holes lasered out and then of course you saw me drill all these location holes in here if you want more information on strengths 700 there's quite a bit online check it out it's pretty cool material here's the plan i need to get all these plates orientated on top of this frame so the problem is how do you align 12 plates all up at the same time and get them all on the same plane basically virtually get all one horizontal surface so first things first i have to get all these pegs [Music] right here's what we're working with i need to get all these pegs welded on top of this frame and i plan on doing this by doing exactly what i have here i've bolted them to the plate that gives me my fixture basically that's not going to move so now the key is just to get the pegs welded in the correct location i'm not worried about the height because we'll worry about that a little later but i need to assort all these plates and line them up so i kind of plan on doing it this way i'm going to use itself as the alignment so i'm going to start in the middle and i'm going to work my way out to the sides line them all up and then as you can see here i'm lining them up with a lug nut and then i didn't have the correct thread it's just probably a half inch fine thread but i just grabbed a bolt and i sandwiched the holes between two lug nuts and that those lug nuts align those holes up to get them uh the center lines in line with each other so i'm just going to hop skip and jump i'm going to leap pad across here and get them all dialed in and then we'll come back and we'll just put a little a little bead on the around each one of these on each side and we'll move on and then after we get all the the pins dialed in we'll worry about how to get the plates level so we'll talk about that a little later [Music] all right i'm just putting the panels back on because i want to see the how uh how it looks with all the pieces on and i thought i'd show you because i'm sure you're wondering oh i bet you those studs moved and twisted and warped as soon as he took that plate off everything went went to crap but here's so here's the plate and what we're going to end up doing is take all the plates off we're going to end up flipping the lock nuts over so the nylon is actually on the stud but i just want to sit them on here because i just i'm anxious to see what it looks like but i'm also curious to see will i be able to line the holes back up right one the first one's always the easy one right there's two there's three threading it in with my fingers there's four right so if there was any bind in this there'd be no way in hell i'd be able to turn all those down with my fingers this thing hasn't moved one bit lock it down [Music] how sweet is that this is even working out even better than i thought all right so here we go all the tiles are on all the fixture tiles and turned out pretty good i'm the table's all the way up just because it was really actually nice to work on it with it all the way up i still had some little sanding to do some bbs to knock off but for the most part it's turned out pretty sweet i'm really really impressed on even how strong everything is but now here comes the fun part we need to be able to dial 12 surfaces all into the same plane and get them all flat and this is going to be a whole controversial topic on how to do this um but uh we'll go into more depth here in a second all right guys the next step of this is to actually dial in the tops of those plate leveling adjustments okay so we're gonna we want to be able to set the tops of all these nuts in the same plane okay so when i originally shot the the build footage of this the stage is so large that it's really hard to capture uh what's going on and be able to visualize what's happening so i generated this little small model right here and forgive me it's not to scale okay so here's here's me mr iron man okay just kind of set the stage so and i want to be able to show you the components of what's going to happen so you have an understanding when you watch the actual real footage okay so here's the plan well first before i show you that let's let's let's go over some of the tools we're going to be using okay so you guys are probably wondering what the heck's in the box right what's this we have music wire okay music wire one music wire two okay multimeter i bought this at a dollar at a garage garage sale pretty cheap right this one's nothing fancy don't go out and spend several hundred dollars on a fluke you don't need it okay one simple ball bearing okay that's it pretty easy and you're you're probably thinking yourself really that's it that's what he's gonna dial his table in with so let's open the boxes i don't know if you can see that or not one really thin strong music wire okay and this music wire the thin music wire is represented by this one right here the moving wire okay i have all if you when it comes down to it all this information is in is in the plans in the back the suggested tool list with part numbers and where to find this okay larger diameter music wire represented by this bar right here okay so let's take you up to the board i'll explain kind of explain to you what's going to happen so and the welding to in the welding world it's really hard for us to generate a plane and we're going to go back to the three points make a plane system i know you guys have heard this before okay so inside is our table okay if i draw a line between these two my table has now been encapsulated in what has been defined as this perfect flat surface okay so that's the general idea on how we're gonna do this okay so how do we turn something to high school geometry into the real world that's the other problem so this is how this is how we solved it okay so what's gonna end up happening is you're gonna need a a monument a fixed point and this is a immovable object this could be this block is represented by a screw in the wall a piece of equipment i don't care if it's the flatbed of your pickup truck actually don't use the flat back of your pickup truck because that guy might might move you're going to have to be creative on this i don't know what's in your shop okay so a monument of some sort that doesn't move this is point number one point number two and three is this right here and it's represented by this bar and this bar is holding the larger diameter wire and it's strung tightly between two points okay so this is what sets the plane move this over here okay we don't need iron man anymore you guys get the scale right so and of course our table that's already with the bolts all the way all already welded in and what we really need to do is just be able to pick up the four points of this table that's the important part if we get the four points we've set our surface and then we can go in between and fill in the gaps or fill the field in by getting the tops of them flat so here's the order process get your table flat little level with just a simple construction level okay this next thing you need to do is we need to set these points these points are defined by also setting for level but they also need to be adjusted at the correct elevation and that elevation is set by this little this is what we're going to be measuring with is this ball bearing okay and what's going to end up happening is we're going to be moving this string or not a string but this ball bearing over the top is of the stud okay obviously this ball is not to scale and we're going to be measuring in between the stud and the and the wire so that's what we're going to be measuring so whatever diameter ball bearing you have i suggested a one inch ball bearing this happens to be a 7 8 but i suggested a one inch ball bearing so you need to be able to set the elevations of these three points approximately one inch above your stud okay and run those nuts almost all the way down to the tops of the studs so you got maybe a sixteenth sticking out over the top of the stud okay that way you have adjustment to come up okay and the this is this piece of tube still set on some saw horses and they need to be securely down too so you have you're going to have to mess with this this is going to define your plane because whatever this plane is your table is going to end up matching it the studs will so get it close one inch above tops of studs so mess around this these are saw horses this is whatever you have in your shop okay i don't know what you have be creative this is the second monument this is what's needs to be also held very tightly and movable because we're you're going to need to stretch the string very tightly across okay and this is also very critical as this adjustment because you're going to need to be able to adjust the string up and down because as you wrap the string tighter to get it tighter you want the string to barely touch the point of tangency on top of the string not push down on it not rest on it you don't want it resting but you just it's thousands of is barely to kiss it okay so you gotta pull tension and be able to adjust so that's the premise and so as you move this monument across scraping across this plane you're going to pick up one stud you're going to move you're going to pick up the second stud you're going to move you're going to pick up the third and then you're going to do a final move and pick up the fourth so that will set this plane okay now you're probably asking what's the meter for well the meter is the trick the trick of the trick because this music wire is so fine it is so hard to see i could have very good vision but it's also very hard to see so what you're going to end up doing let's choose some colors here ball bearing right the string is going to come across and touch the point of tangency but it's so hard to see that and the reason why i want to use a ball is because as you're moving the ball around if it's square a square shim you might have you might accidentally kick a corner and you're giving yourself an unrealistic measurement so the ball you're always measuring the center line of the ball okay that's always constant so because we can't see the string touch the ball okay we need to be able to hear it and that's what the meter's for we'll literally ground one side to the wire or the monument over here and to the table so what will happen is when you kiss just make contact with that wire the meter should chirp if you have an auto audio setting or see the meter pick it up so that's how you know that you've dialed that in so it is just fine adjustments with the nut you raise it up and you dial it in pretty cool huh okay so i know you're thinking yeah right this looks like a lot of time to set up but this took me uh roughly two hours to actually set this up and actually get the four corners dialed in it might take you a little longer than that but shoot we're going for perfection here so why not take the extra time it's well worth it okay so as you can see i'm missing some studs inside here you can either continue to use the same rig and pick up the studs all in between or in my suggested tool list i recommended a straight edge and now you can straight edge between these points and dial the nuts up to the bottom of the straight edge it just saves you a little extra time it's a little bit faster okay so that's one way to achieve it too but so once you get these four points set these are your monuments these four points will never ever ever move you should never change these four points because that's your plane everything else in the side you can manipulate and adjust but you can always come back to those four points at any point in time okay all right i want to give you another detail here i want to show you what this little section looks like okay so here i whipped this up in i don't know a matter of 15 minutes so this connection is this connection okay this is just scrap literally just scrap this base is just a piece of tube steel as you see i just drilled a hole through it put a piece of all thread just tacked it at the bottom okay now what this allows me to do is because as you tighten this you wrap this wire around this spool okay as you know anything that wraps around a spool it changes elevation around the spool okay might move up and down to adjust the tension so we need to be able to lower the elevation of the spool itself okay so that's where the nuts come in we're able to leave the tightness of the music wire but also change the elevation and that's where this comes into so as you're as you're doing this you want that you're bringing this wire down you're bringing this wire down you're bringing this wire down just to barely makes contact with this one okay and where you don't want it pushing down hard you just you're just barely going to be able to see it touch it okay so that's the goal so that's that little rig okay so that hopefully that helps you give you a little bit of overview on how what you're going to see in this video i know this is getting kind of long but i don't want you guys to uh feel like you don't have enough information to tackle this project okay okay so let's move on all right everyone here's the bar that i'm going to be using as the the resting point as you're going to see it's 10 feet long it's a piece of 2x2 square tubing okay with that heavy wire gauge wire stretched on top of it the tube steel is there to hold the the tension in the wire okay as you can see i just wrapped it around make sure you wrap it around something round because if you try to do a fisherman's knot or something on the end of this what's going to end up happening is the wire will break okay so don't ask me how i know that's just what i experienced okay so that's the straight edge there all right youtube so here's the here's the setup there's one point of this triangle i don't know if you can see it i just wrapped it around just like we said on the strong back and i've clamped it to the edge of the table at the other edge of the table is the other end that's ten feet long okay so there's a wire stretch across there and so basically i leveled that in with a laser line okay fixed to the hard point on the other side is another point and i just grab some scrap metal it's just a dowel and i just drilled a hole in it wrapped it around tack weld some little scrap pieces so i clamp it to the table okay this is also close to level it doesn't have to be perfect but it's plus or minus a quarter of an inch from the other side okay then i don't know if you can see it there but there is that 14 thousandths cable goes across and it heads over here in this direction so this is my hokey dokey adjustment but it's actually pretty dang functional so as i slide this rig across the back to align it to what stud i want because as you can see like i want to align the corner stud i orientate it right above the top okay and then you're going to say height what about the height [Music] let's get you in here real close so that little rig i can just barely touch focus the top of the string okay that's what the all threads for over here so i can dial this thing up and down so it touches the top of the string okay now for the interesting part take a look at this i don't know if you're going to be able to see this this is pretty tough i have a ohm meter and it's grounded to this side and it's grounded to the table okay so when i'm dialing the nut in probably can't hear that but i can't see it touch the ball but i can hear it the meter is literally just kind of little chirp so that's how i dial the nut in okay pretty simple so basically i'm going to hit this corner i'm going to move it i'm gonna hit this corner as you can see it just happens to hit this one okay dial it in hit that corner and hit the other corner and once i get those four corners that has now set my plane i now have a plane to work with this is what this whole goal is about now i can use a straight edge to go from stud to stud to stud to stud and dial them all in okay so there's the setup let's see if it works all right everyone i want to walk you through on what i'm going to do i got the string you can see for the the wire tensioned over this peg but i want to move it and i want to hit this one to dial it in and i'll show you how i do that over here so i'm just loosening the tension on the on the wire and moving this rig over to [Music] the position i want to measure and you can do this off of anything you can be on some saw horses and another piece of tube steel if you guys are going to try tackling this exercise yourself you're going to need to be imagination and find things around your shop to use as an anchor point okay so i won't be obviously you're not going to have a table probably like i do in the back or also you wouldn't be doing this exercise but use your creative imagination break it and now since i got tight i'm going to adjust the elevation i want this string to just touch this horizontal here so i need to come down okay you just see it touch [Music] lock it down you can hear that it's pretty tight and now i have my meter set to kill here grab my ball and i just come in here and i check so you guys hear you it hear the meter chirping right there okay i thought it'd be fun to hear to do a little test just to see how much does it really take to move this and how accurate can we really get and how much wrench movement per thousandths of an inch do we have so let's let's see what we got so there's five thousandths okay all right so after you got the the corners dialed in you can either use a straight edge if you want i have this one available to me it's 50 inches long and it's accurate within 2 000 of an inch i think in that 50 inches so instead of moving the string from stud to stud to stud stud i'm just using a straight edge and you could this is a inexpensive straight edge i think it's like 40 bucks but more than accurate enough for this project and you can just sweep so dial in the studs in between and then just go around and just check them all go diagonal and just dial them all in and you can it's pretty amazing that you can see at the light between the stud and get down in here so you can see it's hard you can't even see the light between there and just go through and dial them all up so that's how i did it all right guys so here i'm just verifying this straight edge right here it says 1024 inches 2038 and 3 thousands and 50 inches so that's what the tool i'm using and i'm verifying it on the granite surface plate here to see if it really is as accurate it is as it is and yes it is so just for you guys who want to know is this straight yes it is so let's go measure the table all right it's finally time to check this baby out and see where we're at and see how we did okay but first before we get started i just want to remind everybody what our targets were so after i tested the strong hand table i i did find what specifications that those were supposed to be or the tolerance of the manufacturer kept them in and i found the bill pro specs online and the bill pro and the strong hand are virtually almost the same thing and they say their table flatness is 12 000 in three feet so from here to here they're saying they could be off twelve thousands okay so i did a little more digging and i came up with a found another specs on another table you guys are familiar with it they link together tab and slot design and all these tables i have nothing negative to say about them whatsoever it's just i wanted a baseline to go off of okay and their specifications say flat to plus or minus fifteen thousands okay so they're saying thirty thousandths from the lowest point to uh to the highest point but what i'm disappointed with is they didn't tell us what they didn't tell us is that thirty thousandths in two inches is that thirty thousandths and four inches they've left that very vague on that specification so i'm not quite sure how to interpret that and that was on their pro table a half inch thick and they call it their block i believe which is pretty sweet so those are some targets for us to see can we beat that okay all right enough talking let's uh let's see this thing go and see how it moves if it's moved okay so let's start with where did we start with last time i believe we started with the 15 000 so i'm sure you guys can see that okay the reflection in there okay so let's just go from grid to grid and see where we end up okay i prefer setting the straight edge on the surface and trying to pull it out that's my preferred instead of trying to instead of trying to sit here and we'll go in and fish it across there it's kind of a pain in the butt so this is my preferred to set it on can i drag the straight edge and we go okay do it this way so you guys can see so if you see the straight edge move you know that that's the high point on the table 15 000 is definitely high everywhere we go so it's looking really good [Applause] okay so there's 15 thousandths and if we were if i were to call that 15 thousandths is pretty dang flat for a welding table across this whole surface so that alone just proves wire is it's the simplest of tool right to dial in a flat surface i'm super impressed but let's just take it a bit further how to think how how accurate is this table and for you guys who don't know what 15 thousandths looks like that is a business card thickness so that's a business card flatness across this whole table that's that's pretty impressive with building it here in the garage okay but i want to take it a step further let's where did we stop at before five let's try five thousandths okay so five thousandths is just a little bit thicker than your human hair on your head okay so let's start back to where we started again five thousandths looking pretty promising here so okay so 5 000 so far is the high point in this table okay what about going diagonal here oh it's a little bit right there it's it's pulling it though okay definitely there five thousandths there five thousandths there five thousands there i can go back this way and show you yes five thousandths it's pretty spectacular that's five thousandths of an inch so far i don't know guys that's pretty amazing uh if if five thousands if someone were to tell me earlier that i was going to be able to attain 5 000 flatness across the surface when i started this project i would have called i would have taken that bet in two seconds i would have said no way right but let's not stop at five let's let's actually see what the table really is okay so i prepared let's just go down to three thousandths of an inch okay let's see where three thousandths gets us and i know what you're thinking why would anybody need a table that's flat to three thousandths of an inch well dewey probably not but i'm a craftsman do do i want to have uh do i want to strive for the best i can do on everything absolutely okay so there's three thousandths there's three thousandths three thousandths three thousandths three thousandths three thousandths three thousandths okay three thousandths corner corner three thousandths oh right there we're starting to see a little bit of a low point make sure there wasn't something underneath that it's it wants to move it it's touching i mean that's three thousands right there you can see it's trying to move that that's three thousandths low diagonal okay let's uh we can test this way too but i think i already did that okay overall that's pretty good i can step it down to two but i think that's pretty pretty ridiculous right all right that straight edge is pretty fun but this is the part that i find fascinating is the is putting two squares on the surface because this is kind of the way i use the table mostly anyway because i use the table as a reference and use my fixture squares or whatever to reference off this plane to square stuff up this way so if these plates got all these inaccuracies in it these aren't gonna sit the way i want them to and plus it shows if we're measuring only a 10 inch i think 10 inches here will be gain a little bit so it shows a little more accuracy but let's just scoot these around the table and see where we end up okay so i don't know if you can see this virtually we'll do with the scientific method okay so you guys can see make sure this is all clear here's a one thousandth shim okay stays now let's move to the bottom pretty dang good let's just scoot it over to here okay or better yet we can just bump it into it and see if i can force it nope oh right there wants to stick but what is it three thousandths at the bottom barely so there's three thousands at the bottom i think that's pretty square as we go along here okay let's switch directions here i don't know if you can see uh if you can run the camera up that it's pretty i mean there's virtually no light there's 2 000 shim just hangs in there it's wedged itself in there so there's two thousands it's pretty dang good for a welding table i must say right and i've moved this over and you get a lot of similar results okay pretty pretty awesome now my favorite let's let's do the the skate test and let's skate the same precision straight edge bottom around the table to see if we can see any uh elevation changes between the plates okay so let's do that okay we're going to do my favorite skate testers i'm just going to slightly drag this over the edge of the surfaces and if we run into problems it will bounce into the edge of the plate here i want you to get a real close close up on the edge of this plate too you can see that that's a sharp edge it's been barely broken so you're going to say oh you put a big chamfer on the edge of that you know what it's going to skate over the top of it well no they're actually still kind of sharp okay i'm not trying to hide any secrets here from you guys i want you guys to be able to build this on your own [Applause] [Music] pretty sweet okay so let's do one more walk around the table and i'll show you some more of the features so let's get down here close this is this was an add-on that i added on to the table this is just a jack shaft that hooks to the release of the jack and it comes over here i made this little bracket here and it's got a spring so when i rake when i want to lower the table i can just pull down it releases it and then i just let go and it just shuts it off it's just a feature you guys don't have to do any of that stuff but and of course it goes up and down how sweet is that right oh let's go around to the back side over here i'll just show you the the ground the ground the grounding bar this is a piece of copper that i have drilled and tapped into the frame because this frame goes up and down you can't ground to like the foot because you have a powder coat in between so and then this will be a connection to make a pigtail come off so i can hook it to the to my work and this will be the incoming uh ground right there or i can or i can clamp multiple grounding bars to this and be done so pretty cool huh all right guys so i want to go over a couple more cool features of the opportunities that having plates like this provide for us for one and i'm sure you're thinking how come you didn't do a three-point triangle over four points well the four points on this plate gives me ultimate stability so that when i put my clamps in any of any place in here that it is very strong and the plate will not move or twist okay so that's why the four points are there is just for strength generally okay second i bought all these plates and i want to be be able to use every surface available on them not this surface but also the back surface okay so if this plate were to get damaged i can flip it over and use the other side there's weld spatter on it right i paid for the plate i want to be able to use as much surface of it that i can possibly use so now i basically have two tables so i can flip all these plates over at any given time after you grind on it saying bb's off whatever i have two nice surfaces okay well everyone i think we accomplished what we set out to do and there's very few projects i can look back in my life and say that uh that they had turned out better than i expected and this is absolutely one of them when i started this project i was expecting to see a flatness across here of to be honest 30 thousandths i thought was going to be what i was going to be targeting for but to see this level accuracy with some simple wire and it got me really thinking you know what this is how the world was really built before we had lasers and technology is just simple tools i mean how do you think some of the the equipment was was built back in the day before lasers so pulling back from previous tradesmen is kind of fun to see how they did things back in the day right but i want to let you guys know that i'm not saying that this flatness is for everybody okay because i am a craftsman and because i push myself to do the best i can on everything i do that i take it to this extreme okay that's the beauty of having a table like this you can set it up to where you want and to be honest with those strings it was virtually it just came out this accurate i didn't really try to get it this perfect i did take the straight edge after i did have all these plates on and i just lightly fine tuned some of the plate inaccuracies from the laser being cut but it was very minimal you can spend literally hours if you wanted to dial this in but the three thousandths that i have achieved here i'm totally acceptable with and to be honest a lot of that variance comes within the plate itself and the straight edge itself and just the built-in tolerance of what i have because these are not uh machined parts okay so but on that note i'm super ecstatic to show this build with you i look forward to doing a couple of these other builds with you the near future so stay tuned okay i'd like to remind you guys that the plans for this table are available everything from the cut lists are in here to cut the material to the size of the material to the thickness of the material all dimensions are in here and just a reminder to the the tools i used to build this the straight edge and the other wire that you saw in here the ball bearings where to get it and the part numbers are also included in the plans so please pick that up there's a lot of useful information in there and i look forward to seeing your guys's tables and how you guys improve mine so i look forward to seeing that all right i want to offer up some bonus footage stuff that i just couldn't fit in the video or find a place for and before you hit the comment button i want to maybe to address some questions you guys probably have so here's some bonus footage alright so i want to add a little bit to this i'm sure you're wondering why i've chosen to use the ball bearing as the shim instead of just having the stud with the nut and running the wire directly across the top of the the studs okay well this isn't very good practice because what's going to happening is our human error is going to add to the inaccuracy of this and what i mean by that is so if we dial this nut up and we accidentally because maybe we can't see we might alter the course of this wire so it might we might end up putting it too high and then it's going to try to go back down again so the adjacent nut next to it we it's automatically it's it's off okay so we're going to be running that up not up too high than where it needs to be so we can actually start stacking these inaccurate tolerances or by using the shim that wire will always stay on course and just that one isolated stud might be off okay so we'll we'll keep that the tolerance band of perfection if this is optimal we will stay within this frequency of this tolerance of whatever it is okay by using the the ball bearing okay so that's why we're choosing to do this this is pretty common uh if you're setting up a fence posts or bricks or anything that you're using a string line to use this is a great application never use the string as the as the setup itself use it separate it from what you're trying to line up okay so that's why i'm sure you're wondering why we're using wire instead of that fancy straight edge that you guys have been seeing seeing me use to set up this table well i'll go over the straight edge in a minute but i want to show you why we're going to be using why i'm using the string or the wire let's just say and this is a crude model of what you guys just saw because the wire doesn't show up on the camera i'm using these this pipe for demonstration so bear with me so we know the part of this system that's going to be inaccurate is me the human and all this equation so if i can use mathematics to help eliminate some of the error that i personally might introduce into this table i'm going to take full advantage of it so this is demonstrating the moving wire that moves across the table and as you can see the orange the orange line there is kind of representating halfway okay now my job is when i move this over here i have to set this tube as close to the tangent point on the wires as humanly possible without putting pressure down on it or being too high okay so that's my job as the human in this equation but i might not get it perfect every time but what i do know is because of what i have going on here i have uh the ratio is in my favor so if i'm not perfect where i'm measuring out at the table is that is that tolerance is cut in half so let's just say if this is one foot where that orange dot is that's only six inches okay so if i get this to be within 1 000 that's a half a thou there okay so everything that i do gets uh it's not exaggerated so that's one of the ways that this method is so accurate okay and now let's check out the straight edge and why i decided to do it that way okay here are some reasons why i chose not to use the straight edge from the very beginning to set up and initialize dial in these studs okay so pretend that we are just as fun we're gonna try to establish the tops of the the studs okay now it's real easy to get from this point to this point they can just be random height so they are what they are okay that's straight and then pretend this these are the corners of the of the table okay so we can get that point you can get this point no big deal then you can turn the straight edge around and come to the other corner of the table and now you've established three points right we know three points make a perfect plane you can set the straight edge on the corners and pick up the middle okay well here's the problem with this table is the middle stud isn't in the middle okay it's about here okay there is no middle stud okay so here's here's the other challenge okay so that stud is sitting there we've dialed this middle stub up to the middle but now we want to establish mr corner over here okay well in order to establish mr corner over there to get our whole surface established we need to now turn the straight edge over and because there is no stud that's in line with this corner i am forced to now come over here i don't know if you can see that that the straight edge is no longer trying to pick this corner up okay so you're then therefore you're going to try to pick that up over here well and that's all fine but here's the problem here's the other problem with the straight edge that i don't like this stud right here in the middle is very critical okay let's rewind for a minute let's say at this moment in time i did not get this stud height correct i i got it too short by a few thousandths of an inch okay represented by this short can here so that corner is all determined by this stud so if it's too high or if it's too low guess what happens because mathematics is now working against me anything that this is wrong is gonna be accentuated or worsened out at the end of the stud so it could be way too high it could be way too low so if this is off by one thou that's definitely two thousands low out there so the math is working negative and against our favor to try to get to it over there okay so and i have to move the straight edge multiple times to try to pick up that one corner stud and i know i'm going to be stacking tolerances going in the wrong direction so where this tool comes in extremely handy is when there's already a surface established that's my belief and it works awesome for that okay but in this particular application because i can't reach the corner and that it works like a teeter-totter to where every alignment is coming through it works negative second it's only 50 inches long what happens if i have a table that's four foot eight to try to find a straight edge that's ten feet long to go from diagonal to to diagonal is very expensive and i don't even know if there's one exists that we could afford for one that's in our shop okay so i like the string or the wire method just because i can have any size shape or table and it eliminates more air because i can reach all the points all at one time okay so that's why i'm not using the straight edge and i'm not discouraging you guys from trying to use it i'm just saying in this particular application it is for me it's not the right tool okay i was playing around with the big monster square here just for fun just to squeeze this thing around the table but virtually like those gaps aren't even here it's kind of cool guys okay i want to talk to you a little bit more about these studs and why i chose to do it did what i did and didn't i didn't when i originally started thinking about the table i was originally just thinking bolts right but as i was experimenting with the bolts or all thread i found that they're literally junk when i would thread the bolt down or the nut on top of the bolt what i found is the nut isn't sitting square with the center line of the bolt so this is was and it depended on which bolt it was but it would literally [ __ ] on there so as you twist it you're getting this this motion and throwing off the accuracy of whatever you're doing so uh i kind of abandoned that that setup second you're probably thinking all thread too well if you were to i hate welding all thread to anything anything flat because what you get is undercut around the threads and undercut to me is a weak spot and you'll generally get a crack or a failure point at at that point okay second bolts have this coating on here which you then have to grind off or sand blast in order to get a good weld that's another downside okay so by designing these specifically for this application we get the best of both worlds look at this everything's machined so the base is flat they're all perfectly in length the threads have been they're square to the center line because they're machined they're not crimped so this the nut sits square on top of this and you get a lot better finished product you don't have any gross material you're going to have to sand or grind off there ready to weld out of the box okay so that's the benefit of it and second you got the the tapped hole in the center okay so i do have limited amount of these so be the first to get yours and i look forward to seeing your projects when you guys are done send me some pictures

Channel: Fireball Tool

Views: 689,823

Keywords: fireball, tool, Fireball tool, Welding

Id: EDeIq3SZNRs

Length: 101min 57sec (6117 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020