How to Use a Fixture Table Like the Pros

so I'm building a Star Wars office and inside the office space we're building some stairs so I'm doing a lot of fabricating with some 1x2 Square Tubing to build the stairs and I thought this would be a great opportunity to show you what I'm doing with the fixture table and maybe show you some hints and tips because this is not your standard Plain Jane weld frame [Music] today I'm going to be building one of the more complicated stairs in this entire staircase I'm not going to touch this material until I'm basically ready to start welding what I want is to let the table tell me where to position each one of these pieces and then to give you a little more insight on what's going on this has got to slip inside of that I've given myself like a sixteenth of an inch around this whole thing really tight almost to the point to where it's probably not going to fit so I'm not going to use this as a template I'm going to challenge myself to see can I do it without it I want to walk you through what's going through my brain as I do this everything has a purpose and I'm not going to just going to throw stuff down here on the table if I don't need it Wyatt has drawn these out for me he's given me a zero zero and as you can tell we have some 45s and they need to be accurate so let's start with this corner and we'll give ourselves a reference surface to go off of and I'm going to do that with fence blocks the neat thing about fence blocks is that I can set these to hit any nominal Dimension which means I can make it land on one two three four five six seven eight nine ten as we go I'm going to use these as much as possible and if anything doesn't land on a nominal number we'll use a different fixture and this is going to be kind of a zero zero you can position the fence block this way if you want to or you can position it this way now because my tubing is tall I'm going to try to keep the roll out of it and one thing about a fence block is that it has a little bit of movement side to side and that would be fine if you're working on low material something that's shallow and low you're not going to see that little bit of Wiggle but I'm going to try to keep some of this twist out of this tubing so I'm going to turn it like this this gives me a perfect 90 degree corner and then with every tube I normally like two blocks now we're straight this way now we need to go over here you know what I kind of screwed this up look at this this is my zero zero but we're going to come in the negative numbers so I need to move everything forward a little bit no big deal we're just going to slide everything up so where is this piece at well it's 16 and a half inches from zero so let's put a stop there I'm gonna use this guy this is a tooth block now the neat thing about this block is that I can configure it in many different ways I can put a riser lock on here and make it a 90 degree fixture or I can have something that goes the other direction lots of different options it's got a locking mechanism that locks this block together on eighth of an inch increments so what we're going to do is I'm just going to turn this sideways so now I can be in this row and this block doesn't interfere the washer goes down first and the hole the block sits on top and then I can move it to 16 and a half so here's something interesting when I pull the tape measure from this Edge to this Edge that says I'm 1 16 of an inch under now here's something to take into consideration what do I trust do I trust the table with machined teeth or do I trust the tape measure which one do you go off of you can see that I'm on the half inch Mark so I'm going to trust the block and the table holes as being more accurate than my tape measure this is a perfect example of this tool being kind of sloppy so now we got this corner going we'll keep walking ourselves around right from zero here I need to be six inches back this block is just giving me a way to just confirm where I'm at okay so that's done so now we've come around the corner and now we get into this sharp point over here now this is what's tricky this piece right here is important this 45 now I don't want to use my cuts as the reference Parts because these were hand cut on the grinder these were not bandsaw cut the lengths of everything here could be wrong so what I would like to do is set up a tooth block right here and right here on a 45 at the correct distance that Wyatt gave me at 20 and a quarter so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a block over here off into space so I can pull that measurement let's take a look at this fence block this fence Block's got a couple different holes in it now if you look at this one these holes are close they're on two inch centers but when obviously you go to 45 that whole spacing gets wider right it doesn't fit so this block is longer and it's got the appropriate holes to put it in on a 45 so that's what the those extra holes are for but I want to use this to pull a measurement from so it's going to be in this grid pattern or grid line right there so by putting it in this grid line I'm not quite to the corner right here but I'm I'm close now with some simple math and CAD we've determined that this is 3 16. so we've made those adjustments here and you can see this that's what the normal nominal Dimension is and then that's what it is with that 3 16 removed from there we've already accounted for the misalignment so right now I can pick any grid line I want just kind of based on what I'm looking at here so maybe somewhere right there 20 and a quarter nailed it I hit this is a swinging pin so this pin locks the tooth block to the table this pin keeps it from swinging and keeps it on a 45. now all I need to do because I want another one that's parallel to it I'm just going to look at the numbers and look where it's matched and look what grid line I'm in I'm going to just plop it in the hole it's not going anywhere I can't push it backwards because it's locked in with that block it can't slide or move the closer we move our fixtures to the weld the less Leverage The weld has to pull against our fixtures so we're done with this one and now we need to turn the corner we need to start going up which is this piece right here we need to be at 14 inches to there so we're going to use fence blocks because I can be on any number that I want so we're going to set this to 14 inches put that there is 14 inches so this is going around a post that this gets saddled around and gets welded to so this is a critical measurement right I just can't say this piece is good this piece is good let's just fill it in with some metal right there so I'm at 29 and 8 from zero but I know my material is one inch so I'm going to subtract one inch so that's going to be 28 and an eight so I'm going to use this 28 and an eighth this is a new block this is a short Riser and I'm going to use the short Riser because this is going to get kind of cluttered into this corner and having something short in here is going to be optimal 28 and an eighth that's a critical measurement obviously I can't put a piece of tubing in here no big deal this is something I want to talk about I see a lot of people using 28 millimeter tables the whole spacings are on four inch hole centers now that's a big problem you saw me just move this fixture over two inches well this part is only two and a half so how do you put a fixture in here if your grid patterns on four inch hole spacings your options are limited when you have wider hole spacings I'm a hardcore advocate for the two inch hole centers please don't make the mistake of buying the four inch hole center tables I know you're going to say Jason my table has an offset I can go over one more your fixtures get so long because of your full spacings that you can't put the fixtures in these small areas if you're doing submarines or giant cell phone towers and your things are long and big yeah the four inch hole spacing probably not going to affect you that much but if you're doing things like this the two inch hole spacings are a must so now we got this piece to do that guy right there we know he's set at 12 so we're gonna put a fence block right there and because I'm on 12 inch Dimensions I'm going to put the fence block lengthwise so I can clamp to it last but not least this 45 right here we've got a layout of 14 and 9 16. once again I'm going to set a block in here so we can measure 14 and 9 16. so you're going to say Jason what do you do your tooth blocks are only an eighth of an inch increments well not anymore to get the 16th of an inch measurement you're going to use the 16th of an inch washer when you look at them side by side you really can't see a difference like except for if you look at them real close the teeth are misaligned so we've shifted the teeth over to get you that sixteenth of an inch okay got my last pieces set up as you can tell does that look like chaos a little bit but it looks structured so now the next thing I want to do is all the blocks that are on Dimension which is a nominal number I'm going to come back I'm going to back it up with another block like this and leave myself that one inch Gap in there so I can just drop my part in this still gives myself a lock in see nice and tight like that keeps the wiggle out of it stands it up straight the next thing we want to talk about is positioning and putting the material into place I like to space the material up off the table and because this is kind of a small short stubby material two inches I'm gonna space everything up half of an inch these are magnetic shim blocks this is my superset and I like to use the half inch so you can combine quarters two quarters together you can make a half you can stack some eighth of an inchers up there but realistically we just need to get the material up off the table and why first reason if I'm going to come over here to this joint I know I'm going to be welding a downhill right here so I'm going to put this little guard the spatter table protector right here so I can weld all the way down to the bottom if this was touching the table I'm going to stop a half of an inch short so I don't weld this to the table so by lifting it a little bit all the way to the Edge the next thing to consider is the table gets yucky which means it gets dirt grit Grime from sanding and weld spatter the BBS just kind of roll all over the table and I don't want to have to clean all that stuff off in between every setup so if I have 10 of these things to do I'm going to just want to plop material in here by keeping a clean reference spot that's only an inch tall I just have to make sure that's clean and that's clean it's just much faster to space it up off the table a little bit so what I'm going to do is just going to go around the table and plop the shims down now I can rearrange these later if they're in the way but I just kind of like to get them in a rough position all the shims are set up now the real fun begins we get to check my saw work all my parts are labeled so 16 and a half goes in here six 18 and a quarter so as I start laying the pieces in I did notice that this one funky long piece I screwed up on and it's an inch Too Short that's not a big deal because the table saved me from making a mistake so what I'm going to do is I'm going to recut one of these real fast and plop it back into the hole this piece fits much better I can fiddle with it a little bit I can put a weld bead in there all the way around I think that's going to be much nicer and that's one of the cool things that I like about setting the fixtures up this way is that I know the tube is in its correct place and I can manipulate the corners and get the joints looking good even if the miters are off a little bit the other thing change I've made is that this fixture that I put in earlier I really didn't like its position it really kind of blocks this corner so I've removed it completely and I've replaced it with a 7 8 shim and now what I'll do is I'll clamp this entire system together I can clamp this way and I can clamp this way and that will hold this whole Corner 90 degrees on that fence block but other than that what I got to do is clamp everything down I'm just going to put one clamp on here probably right in the middle is all I need but you have to make sure you put a shim underneath of this because if you don't we're going to Bow this tube it's going to push down and then as soon as we release it later it's going to want to spring back and make this whole weldment all warped and then anywhere where I can put a fixture on the fillet I'm going to do that I want to weld this outside corner first and I've blocked it with this fixture so what I'd like to do is just set it back an inch and put a spacer in between these two pieces all I got to do is just move this back a hole so if I just go back an inch clump there's one inch and then these are an inch see how that works now I've got myself a little bit of wiggle room in that corner to put a weld in there never have too many clamps I'm going to take a little bit of e-weld four and then I just missed the fixtures and clamps just for any little spatter I doubt we're gonna have any problems and then this stuff will evaporate and you won't even see it and it leaves no residue behind I think I'm ready to weld I'm just going to stay in one joint and weld it all there and then I'm going to move to another one I'll catch up with you when I have this entire thing welded out [Music] okay the same only one of these to do because I got more time in setting up the fixture than I do welding so I'm just going to let it cool just for a little bit I typically take them out right after I've welded them but this one's a little bit scary so I'm going to leave it in here till it cools and then we'll flip it over and then we'll weld the other side that I missed okay so here's the cut out let's just see how I did drum roll please please please look at that there you go I just knocked the end loose look how nice that fits I mean come on that just goes to show you how Square it is too when you can push it from one side of the weldment to the other right push it all the way through major win Jason doesn't have to do any cutting or grinding yes yes yes yes yes it's a good day when the grinder does not have to come out all that little extra time setting the fixtures being meticulous on my clamps saves me from having to go back and redo my work I think we can expand on this discussion a little bit so I'm inviting you to join me at The Forum I'm going to create a post on how would you make this funky thing if you didn't have a fixture table and how long would it take you to make it be interesting to know how you guys would solve this problem and I'd like to see you guys there

Channel: Fireball 2ool

Views: 93,888

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Id: AjlTodHNjPU

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023