How to Grind Inside Corners - Welding & Furniture Making

hey i'm chris zepp from make everything and today we're going to talk about the dreaded inside corner weld and how to grind it to make it look perfect i'm going to use some simple techniques with some basic tools and show you a couple different ways to take that ugly inside corner weld either for your furniture for a decorative piece and make it look nice check it out [Music] alright so before we get started let's talk a little bit about our goals for today so i make a lot of different furniture and i make a lot of bases for tables stuff like that either for myself or for clients a lot of furniture makers that do slab style tables come to me to make the steel bases now there's a couple of different ways to finish an inside corner on a piece of decorative furniture now on like a structural application you would just weld the inside corner and you just leave it and if you're a good enough welder a lot of times you can leave that inside corner with just like a nice smooth bead on it and that'll be acceptable to most people almost you know all the time you're going to want to at least grind your outside welds and your outside corner but that inside corner is always sort of the tricky spot now i teach an intro to mig welding class here and we make this sort of decorative little cube and we actually don't weld the inside corners because we found that it just takes so much time for the student to kind of achieve a good look it's a really easy way to ruin a piece now that being said those are really just an example on how you're going to learn how to weld so it's not a big deal to leave that open but if you're going to be painting something or having something powder coated you're going to want to finish that inside corner and that's where a lot of people stumble and a lot of people lose time when they're working on their projects so i'm going to show you a couple different ways to deal with that inside corner with some common materials that i use for table bases alright so there's a lot of different ways to grind inside a metal corners now the three ways that i use the most are with a die grinder like this i also like to use files and then my favorite way is to use a curved flap disc now this is from faired this is called apollo fan curve you may have also seen a similar looking disc at like the big box store um home depot sells a similar one by a different brand now the difference between a flap disc like this and a regular flap disc like that is that edge now you can see here we're not going to really be able to grind inside a corner with this edge and we're not going to be able to grind on the back whereas this disc has abrasive that wraps all the way around it so these things are excellent and this is my preferred method but not everybody has these not everybody has them when they need them and they're also you know more expensive they are single use item than say a file or even a carbide burr on a die grinder like this so the material that we're going to use is i have some one by one some two by two and some two by three and i'm gonna just quickly weld these up i'm gonna weld a nice inside corner there and then we're gonna do a little finishing for the welding on this project i'm gonna use my smaller more kind of consumer grade welder this is a lincoln 140 mp this is a mig tig stick machine if you watch my other videos you may have seen my how i make money with my mig welding video that utilized this but my last video i used my bigger welder now the the thing about a machine like this is it's a little more conducive to welding the thin wall material that we're going to be working with today and it's a little more attainable at about a thousand dollars even less if you don't get the tig kit so let's get this thing booted up and get these pieces welded together all right so i've got these three welded up i'm going to quickly just grind these outside grinds just to clean these up so that we're just focusing on that inside corner to grind these outside welds i'm just going to use this is a faired vikto grain disc now this is kind of a heavy grinding disc if these were for like a furniture application i would use a flat disc like this or even the curved flap disc just because i would want to keep the heavy grinding marks to a minimum but since we're just trying to get this ground for example's sake i'm going to just grind these in real quick and get it done all right so now all three of these are ground so again this is 16th wall so it's a little thinner there's a little undercut from the weld this is eighth wall so the weld's a little more pronounced on the outside and so is this so you can see the way that weld is sticking up there now in some applications i've made furniture and that weld sitting in there is acceptable as it is you just sort of leave it um it gets painted it doesn't get touched and it's good to go but sometimes you don't want that corner you want it to look somewhat somewhat square you want this to kind of look like it was one piece of like say cast material so we'll start with the lowest the low-tech method which is with a file and we'll do this small eighth inch one and we'll grind that corner out so that it looks nice and square we're gonna put this over in the vise to do that now if you're going to do something like this you know you do want to be able to get your material nice and stable because getting in there with the file is going to take a little bit of elbow grease so inevitably there's a little edge on the top of this weld and i can kind of get in there and grind it now what i want to do is i want to make sure my file has what's called a safe edge so you can see on this side of the file it's nice and smooth on this side of the file there are teeth now what i'm going to want to do is i'm going to want to make sure i use the smooth side up against my other piece of tubing so that i'm not cutting into this piece of tubing if i use the side with the teeth you can see how i start to cut in so i want to use this smooth what's called the safe side now if your file doesn't have a safe side you can go over to a grinder and you can grind this in you can see i'm wearing down that weld and i'm trying to get rid of that convex shape you can see now i'm getting closer down to my other piece of material now what we can do now is we can get a corner file and try to dig into that corner to square it up a little bit more this triangular file is less than 90 degrees but what you can do is you can use the corner of it to get in and tighten up that shape now what i like to use as sort of my last step is this is a round file or a rat tail some people call it and you can get in there and now smooth this whole thing out and really blend the corner to make it look nice now at this point the corner looks good but you've got some heavy file marks in there and that's a pretty rough grit and if we were going to paint this we'd want to get some of those out so this is just some 120 grit sandpaper and you'll get in there here's a little rubber pad that i made and just try to grind out some of those heavy file marks so now after a little bit of sanding you've got a really nice clean inside corner and if we paint this it's going to translate really well and it's not going to look like a kind of bubbled over weld all right so that's one method down using just files essentially just hand tools really low tech and pretty inexpensive now the next method we're going to do on this material and this is using a die grinder so here we've got a tungsten carbide burr on there and this die grinder is essentially for those of you familiar with a dremel this is like a big dremel with a bigger motor this one's cordless and it's variable speed it's from milwaukee now this die grinder is kind of a teardrop shape and they make many different types of dies these are fair dies like i said they're tungsten carbide they're harder than any material in your shop and what they're going to be able to do is get in there and grind this without using an abrasive that's going to wear away now the only thing about these is that every dye grinder i've ever used puts out a lot of these little shards of metal they're like little metal splinters so i like to wear rubber gloves when i use my die grinder otherwise i find that those splinters will get into my hands and sometimes i'll even wear the rubber gloves underneath my welding gloves just to try to keep that stuff out of my fingertips so let's get ourselves geared up and then we'll grind in this corner you can see how quickly this is able to accomplish that now you can see in just a matter of seconds i'm able to grind down that well to make a nice inside corner now again we could take our sandpaper and we could get in there and try to smooth that out to make it look a little bit bit more refined you can see now that inside corner is looking actually really clean and nice and a little bit more sanding and we could really bring it up so just a few seconds with the die grinder gets us a really nice inside corner and like i said they make these dies in a million different shapes this one's like a teardrop which i found to be really good for inside grinding because you can kind of get inside those corners all right so here's our last one now this corner is the widest this one is three inches wide this is a little thicker material so the weld is kind of bubbled over on the top now here's where we're going to use the curved flap disc with a disc like this you've got a similar geometry to one of these dies but what's going to be nice about this is the speed and the fact that we're going to be able to finish out with this disc and basically do this with one step now this is a 60 grit disc they make these in a couple different grits and we're going to put this on a variable speed angle grinder now one of the things on the faired products that's important is they usually have an rpm associated with the discs most people that run a traditional flap disc like this they typically run them too fast which causes them to burn out prematurely so getting a variable speed angle grinder can really be helpful i use this milwaukee one that i got on amazon it was about a hundred bucks but you could use any variables speed grinder that you can find this disc in particular is recommended at 13 000 rpms so we'll set our grinder to that and we'll take some stabs at this corner and see how we do so now i've got a super clean inside corner and what's nice about these discs versus the other methods is now i could really finish grinding the rest of this piece all with this all right so obviously we could push the finish of all three of these corners a little bit further if we were going for you know say a really high finish or especially if you were going for a gloss paint gloss paint is going to show every single imperfection so you'd want to make these things really look perfect but i wanted to give a quick overview as to you know different methods of achieving these inside corners and grinding them after you've welded them like i said my favorite method is using these curved edged discs and like i showed you what's nice about these is it's kind of a one step process obviously you're going to wear into this corner but you can use the face of this disc to finish around your edges and really get a nice consistent finish on your welded corners on your tubing for a furniture application you're always going to want to prepare your client for what these inside corners are going to look like like i said i build a lot of steel bases for furniture makers and i always ask them if they want the inside corners ground or if they want to just leave them welded a lot of them actually choose to leave them welded which is great for me it keeps the price down for them because i don't have to go through and do any of this and i just leave that nice looking weld in there but either way it's a great thing to know how to deal with inside corners if the opportunity arises and knowing about specific tools is really important to me when i'm teaching people in the shop and when i'm sort of trying to spread awareness it's a lot about tools and techniques because tools and techniques and knowing what's available out there can totally change the way you work you know i had never used one of these curved nosed flap discs until a couple of years ago and it's absolutely changed the way that i work and even just using something like a dye grinder you know i never really had a good one so i didn't really use one when i needed to grind inside corners i would force my way in with a normal flap disc and then i would use files and sandpaper and it would take me forever you saw how quickly you're able to deal with these inside corner welds using the proper tools and it's really not like a huge investment i mean these flap discs are a little pricey but if you're already doing a project where you're welding and grinding there's already kind of a cost to entry that you've beared so you might as well invest a little bit into your own time and buy something that's going to help you get the job done a little bit quicker again files will do the trick they're just going to take a little bit longer the die grinder is going to get you there and it's maybe not going to provide as high of a finish and the best thing in my opinion is the curved nose flap discs all right that about does it for this video thank you guys for watching thank you to fair to braces for providing me with the files dies and the curved flap discs to make this video and spread some awareness about the tools that are out there in order to help you stop the struggle in your shop uh this video is sponsored by ferret and they have been a huge supporter of the shop for a couple of years now so thank you very much to them there will be links in the description on where you can get these types of files dies and disks uh all down below so please go check them out if you have any questions or any other tips about how you handle the inside corners on your welding projects please leave them down in the comments below i want to create a dialogue and help spread information and education around through the viewers and through everyone else that sort of watches on my channel if you want to see what i'm doing on a day-to-day basis follow me right here at make everything shop i post pretty much every day on my instagram and i always share behind the scenes stuff show you what i'm up to and what projects are coming next i hope you enjoyed this video don't forget to subscribe to my channel if you want to see more videos like this more videos in the shop and that's about it thanks again i'm chris zepp for make everything and i'll see you on the next one

Channel: Make Everything

Views: 273,722

Keywords: make, grinding, how to grind welds, how to mig weld, how to weld furniture, steel table base, how to finish a steel table, pelican curve, how to use a flap disc, die grinder, carbide burr, how to use a file, pferd burr, Pferd die grinder, how to do it, how to weld, how to make a steel table base, slab table base, intro to mig welding, 140mp welder, stronghand tools, welding table, fixture table, miter steel

Id: jmN49Z-jvPk

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021