Making a square: Tips for dealing with warping during welding

what's up YouTubers so for today I got a little bit of a challenge video and not so much I guess for you guys although you can definitely partake in what we're doing here but for me and I'll explain I had a viewer request he said he was trying to make a 90 degree welder Square out of eighth inch inch and a half angler okay now I don't know if he was trying to get a 90 degree inside corner or a 90 degree outside corner I have no idea so we'll come up with something but his issue was is well one he couldn't cut straight so he was hoping you know down the road to get a dry cut saw and well I got news for you you don't need one of those to make straight cuts and I'll show you a couple ways on that how to do that so that was an issue and two he found out the hard way that when you take something and you put heat to it with welding that it doesn't stay straight now he believed that maybe he didn't have a clamped hard enough but I can tell you that there's far more to that than what you would think on keeping stuff straight so what we're going to really tackle today is we're going to make a welder square of some sort that's hopefully going to be perfectly 90 degrees and I'll show you a ton of ways to do that and we're going to talk all about how metal warps and what you can do about it when welding all sorts of stuff so this is going to be kind of a little bit of fabrication and also a ton of tips that will hopefully help you on projects other than this so let's get into it so if you want to make anything that's reasonably High Precision AKA Square straight Plum true level whatever you have to start out with some form of an instrument that's accurate to test that which in the case of this this Square here should hopefully be accurate enough to make us another square of some sort but you know if you're trying to make something accurate having a Precision instrument tell you whether or not it is it's kind of a must and I want to show you something so this in theory is a perfect 90 degree angle is it perfect well who knows this thing has been around the shop falling on the floor a few times we don't know that but I would take a guess and say it's probably more accurate than a lot of things in front of us we have a piece of very thick 3 8 thick angle iron and the reason I bring this up is that it's very common for myself and other people to use this as a base to clamp to to get a 90 degree angle and I will show you what I'm talking about so what you can see there is this is fairly accurate okay to a 90 degree outside corner but it is not perfectly accurate now for a lot of the things we do the accuracy of this outside corner is more than close enough to meet what we're looking at doing however if you absolutely have to have precision guess what this isn't going to cut it not only that if you look at the surface finish on this with all this Mill scale and then this is grown clean the accuracy is probably plus or minus one or two degrees on this end to end depending on where you clamp it now if you were to take and machine this thing flat you could definitely turn it into a higher Precision instrument of sorts but again we're just basing on what we have here out of curiosity I'm going to look at this angle iron and see how close this is if I can get it on I haven't looked at this yet so it's close but it's got a little bit in it here I'll bring that down I can rock this ever so slightly on it so again one or two degree accuracy so knowing where you are to start with really helps so we already know that from a 90 degree perspective on this we're a little bit off but that's all right because that's of little concern we mainly want an outside corner to be 90 degree or an inside corner depending on what type of square we're making so now let's look at a couple ways to cut straight so the first way to make 45 degree angle on something like this so that we can with two cuts equal 90 is to take your Square here make sure that the ruler is lock down so it's accurate hold it on your steel and then simply mark it that is it's close to a 45 degree line as you're going to get Now by taking an angle grinder with a cut off disc we can actually cut through this and as long as you follow the line which on a shortcut like this really isn't that hard it's not going to be that difficult to get a perfectly 45 degree miter now to do this other side what you got to do is just line this up with where that terminates on this you've got to bear with me a little bit because I got to balance a lot of things here all right somewhere about right there that looks pretty good so as long as we angle grind on those marks and grind straight to cut through that we will be looking good so that's what I'm going to do now I'm going to clamp this down to the table hanging off cut it off and then we're going to use our square and look at how accurate this is I'm not sure what happened but the footage got deleted by accident or something with me cutting off that angled piece it's pretty easy with an angle grinder just be smart about it don't cut your fingers all right let's move on to some alternative methods so another way you could expedite this is to take your square a piece of Steel like this Square it up as good as you can to this material and then you would take another piece slip it under here line it up with approximately you know in line there so this Edge is in line on this bottom plate to here welded underneath here and now you have essentially what is a makeshift Square for getting 45 degree angles on this very accurately fast now you can see this we can get a very fast and accurate 45 but then we have to switch and go down here and then Mark it that way well if you made a little jig here that was set up just like I'm showing you here you would be able to slide it on hold it and then Mark both of them in like one you know one two seconds and you're exactly on so that's another option just for making marks faster the other thing you can do let me take this off is if this was set up like this you could actually just clamp it where you want it and then use this without even marking it with a marker use that as your cutting guide now over time this will wear back so the accuracy in the long term may not be the best but by leaving that set up and then taking your angle grinder and then running it right down that edge and using the edge as a straight guide essentially you straight edge you will be able to cut you know six seven of these pretty fast and have very accurate cuts the other thing you can do with it as well and this is a better application for this is to use you know one of these Diablo carbide blades and a Sawzall and with this clamp down tight you could just run it and chew through it all the way down and have pretty much a 45 degree cut very fast I mean this is by far faster if you set up a jig and just super clamped it nice and tight and then use a saw to cut it you would get very close to 45 degree miters with without any trouble and that's something you know I own a dry cut saw and honestly getting 45 degree miters on that is a little bit harder than you might think and yeah it's fast I mean yeah I can rip through this in a matter of a few seconds without even you know marking anything but I find that the dry cut saws on thicker steel I mean not so much maybe this eighth inch but on thicker steel it has a tendency to wobble and walk a little bit not to mention the miter boxes on those things are so far from accurate that if you really have to get a 45 degree cut honestly you have to set up every cut and verify it's at 45 because mine has a cast aluminum base but the little indexer to do miter Cuts is plus or minus probably four degrees so long story short like this is as simplistic as setting a jig up may actually be more accurate than a dry cut saw it's just it's slower which we all know that taking a long time to do simple things like Cuts is not really in your best interest but like I said this is to teach you guys some solid ways of doing this accurately with minimal tools so with that in your head a little better idea of what what to do with this let's talk a little bit about warping and how to control it and how to make things um not warp in the Direction you don't want to so keep things straight let's get into it all right so a angled grinder cut one of these the other one I actually use that Diablo blade on the Sawzall and just cut it and both of them seem to have came out pretty accurately so no real difference there now our Square with this set exactly where it needs to be very minimal like I can't rock it much so this is looking pretty good in our Gap very tight all the way over it goes without saying that if you want to control bending and warping after welding the tighter the Gap that you have the better you know it's going to be very difficult if you have like a quarter inch gap down here to not have this collapse on you for an inside corner as that weld solidifies it's going to pull it's going to shrink so to weld this I would say that our best bet is to actually have a little bit and I'll move this out a little bit a little bit of a gap here so it's a little bit more open than 90 degrees by a degree or two I'm going to put attack up here attack on the edge right here and then I'm going to put attack probably on the underside on the inside of that corner and I'm going to look at everything after I do that and check it where it is with that kind of better in mind we'll be able to go from there one of the things you guys want to get in the habit of is any time before you start welding on something like this is the first welds I'm going to do for today and the Machine was just turned on you want to make sure that everything's working so rather than me just going and tacking that and finding out oh I didn't turn the gas on if I was MIG welding or oh man my settings are way off take a piece of scrap the same thickness as what you're welding on and run a bead just so you know it's running good So based on that which I use settings that they recommended which is 17 volts and 210 for wire feed we have a little bit of burn through at the start and the stop I would say that that's plenty on the hot side probably almost a little bit too hot but I think for tacking purposes it will work so I'm going to put attack right here right here and then I'm gonna go on the inside and Tack the edges together foreign [Music] so we have that all tacked up I'll show you let's take a look and see how much if any that this actually pulled out a square so I can rock this a little bit which means that it pulled a little bit out of Square open now we got a couple options that we can use to deal with this if I weld the back side of this on the inside first it probably will shrink and tighten this now being that this is an out inside corner Square if I weld it in here we may not be able to use this as a square if you know what I'm saying like it we would have to grind the weld out so what we're going to try and do is weld the inside start to finish and see what happens foreign now I am going to lower my values a little bit so I'm going to go from 17 and 210 for wire speed down to we'll take a guess and say 16.4 and 190. just a rough guess this is all three five flux core wire definitely a little bit on the hot side so did some uh spot welds there being that this is an outside edge I don't know that I'm going to be able to run a continuous beat on this unless I run really really really low values because it's so thin on there so I'm gonna just spot weld it up I don't generally like doing spot welds but for the sake of what we're doing here we want to reduce as much heat input as possible and try and avoid potential issues so I think it'll work all right so we got that let me move it to where you can see it we got that spot welded up again I rather run a continuous bead but being that that edge is so thin I don't know that we're going to be able to do that and certainly this early in the day I probably I'd need at least a couple coffees in me in some practice to really get that dialed in so you can see our our weld is actually decent looking very little spatter this Hobart Fab Shield is really good I'm impressed now if we look inside very minimal melt through and that's what we're kind of hoping for we want to keep that in inside corner as straight as we can as straight 90 that way we can slip this on something with a sharp edge and it won't you know it'll sit in there all right let me brush this a little bit and let's check the accuracy so let's take a look at how accurate we are and we're a little bit off here I'll move this to where you can actually see it there you go ever so slightly we're off a 90. now let me make sure I'm holding this yeah you can see there's about I don't know a 30 second of an inch I mean it's not much but it is off so the question is well how do we fix this now there's a number of ways that we can fix this now first off had we clamped this to a piece of angle iron like this and then clamped it here and here welding that on the inside may have caused it to pull less however my guess is is that the tension in that weld's trying to shrink would have still as soon as we unclamped it still would have pulled it this much so clamping it to something sturdy may or may not work another thought is is rather than cutting these exactly at 45 degrees doping it with one degree or two degree to where it was tighter that would have helped because when we welded the inside it would uphold it essentially straight now to fix this predicament that we're in we can do any number of things we could technically take an angle grinder cut this and cut this tack tap it a little bit weld this and by cut this in here I don't mean cut the whole weld just give it a channel for it to bend this way and cut this Tack and a couple little light blows of a hammer will tighten it up a little bit and then we can weld it starting right here run a couple tacks let it cool a couple tacks let it cool a couple tacks and we're done so that's a possibility as well will that work it may another option we have is to heat the inside of this with a torch after cutting a little bit of a relief in there and it will as it cools that red hot metal will shrink a little bit in here that will bring this forward as well so that's an option another option we have is to cut this tack Bend this forward a little bit with maybe one or two degrees extra re-tack it and then weld it down the problem is is that the wider this Gap in here gets the more it's going to want to shrink and pull down and bring everything out of alignment so those are just a few ways we could also even clamp this down to this bar and just try and weld this in put I don't know another weld on the backside to get enough heat and it may with a little bit of a you know clamping pressure this way it may pull it straight hard to say but I'm going to decide which one we're gonna do and then we're going to attempt it and then see the results oh and I almost forgot we could and this would likely fix it just weld it straight in here let it cool and then just grind that weld out of there you know to where it's flat and I think honestly that's probably what we're going to try and do all right so I made a decision I'm going to run a small weld on the inside of that I increase my voltage a little bit to 16.6 and I lowered the wire feed to 180. now I'm using all three five flux core this would be a better job for all three old because you could deposit a lot smaller of a weld I think but I'm going to run a nice you know high voltage or well comparatively for the wire speed try and get a nice flat weld in there and then we're going to look at it so I went over to get a sip of coffee and heard a pop and guess what mistakes were made this bottom tack Rogue because this shrunk so much it pulled it over and looked that's how much that weld pulled it out of alignment but we're actually still in okay shape what I'm going to do is grind this out a little bit so that I can squeeze this a little bit closer to straight we're going to re-tack it and then we're going to recheck it all right so I ended up running a pretty hot tack over here kind of blew the end out a little bit that's all right we're gonna grind that round anyways but I thought I would show you all right there's basically no movement at all in this and there's no Gap at all so it's almost so tipped a little slightly this much quarter of a degree so we're in good shape what I actually did is I positioned this slightly that way and then when I tacked it it took about 20 seconds it pulled straight so by doping it a little bit too much that way and assuming the weld metal is going to shrink and pull I was able to get it pretty close to inline and it's as you can see there's a whisper of a gap down there and that's exactly what we want because when we weld this out it's going to shrink a little bit and it's going to pull that straighter so my thought is we're close enough to the finish line here I'm going to take and actually weld the inside and I'm going to do spot welds and the reason is is that when I weld it and it solidifies cools down it's going to become solid and then as I do another spot weld it's going to have a harder time pulling because there's solid metal there when you do one continuous hot bead what's going to end up happening just like an auto body is it's going to pull tremendously because you now have that whole length of weld that's shrinking at the same time by doing little bits at a time that are going to shrink it's going to warp less and it's going to pull less so my hope is is that I'm going to clamp this down to the table here on this I'm going to sand it a little bit smoother clamp it down and then weld the back side and we'll see where we're at how much it pulls so to show you our Gap is completely the same bottom the top there so we are officially Square now I welded this side with just a series of tacks not the prettiest thing I'm going to clamp it down and weld a series of attacks here it's not going to shrink that much and we'll finish that out we'll grind this smooth and then I'll take a grinder and clean this out a little bit to where we can have like a straight 90 shouldn't be too difficult to do that and then we'll go and look at it in with the square in a bunch of different directions and see how close it is to uh actually being a square so I buffed it all up cleaned it up cleaned some of the mill scale off as you can see that's about as good as you're going to get short of Machining something like this which I mean most squares that you're going to find are all machined Square they're not like welded from two pieces of angle iron and then not machined it's just the time it takes to square everything up it's far easier just to machine it but I'll put it back here I really cut down in the throat of that a little bit to give some clearance but I mean this is very very close there's like no wiggle room in it at all I mean I can't even wiggle it so better than I guess I would have expected for this you could see it was quite interesting trying to get this to come out and I made a bunch of mistakes during the process which is kind of the point of trying this you know it's not like I build squares down here in the basement all of the time so it was a learning process for me so let's go and uh go to the conclusion so in conclusion what did we learn today well I learned that you can do a lot into pretty high accuracy with very minimal tools take a look at this just rubbing there I don't know better than I would have thought that I could have done given the circumstances but we learned a lot about how Metal Works and this affects all welding not just you know making squares let's be honest a lot of us aren't going to do this it's far cheaper easier to just buy a square but hey can you do it absolutely will it work yeah I mean it does but you know there's a lot of pitfalls you can find yourself in one of which I almost found myself in and that's you end up chasing your accuracy around so you it's bent one way so then you weld it or modify to bend it the other way and then you go too far and you end up chasing you know your numbers around and you can't get it dead on and to get things dead on really require experience and knowing what's you know what's going to happen and you you simply don't know what will happen unless you have experience I fortunately have enough to kind of know what kind of Pitfall I'm getting myself into with this and what I was mildly successful but the whole point of this is really to show you that with a little bit of pre-planning and thought process in something you can actually have pretty high success I also want to mention on this and I had said I don't commonly tack weld with flux core and if you look at here you can see pin dot porosity in there after I ground the weld down that's going to be very common with flux core and I even brushed all the slag and flux off of the weld before you know I tack it clean it tack it and I still have that now part of it is I weld it on a side after the other side was welded and it brought likely some contaminants through but even so very common flux core in order to prevent this I would have had to have ran a lot higher of values and those higher values may have caused enough heat input to warp this so when doing tax like I had said in a video I'm not a huge fan of doing tack welds with flux core wire that's a better job for TIG or Mig processes that don't have flux or slag inclusions Etc you get the idea but beyond that I think it's important to practice stuff like this I mean maybe not making a square but pushing a limit on what you can do just so you get an idea what's going to happen and I know when I was growing up and learning to fix stuff like I made countless mistakes and just stupid decisions I mean even on my Jeep the other day I ended up wrecking a 200 and some dollar clock spring because I pulled a steering wheel and didn't wasn't paying attention so like crap happened happens you know it's guess what I won't do that again just like I learned enough on this to where if I was going to make another Square I bet I could do it in half the time more accurate with less of a headache and that's really what it comes down to when making stuff you know really doesn't matter what it is experience pays off and with that said I just want to share something one of the things that I learned a long time ago is that really you've only failed if you give up now had I made this and like the person would written that post had I made it and it just was way out and there's no way to fix it and I just threw it in the round file and just walked away from it I would have failed had I kept going even if it took five of these kept going and eventually made it that's not failure that's success so really you only fail completely if you give up and some of the stuff that you're gonna find is gonna be hard and it's not just welding but in life in general but as long as you don't give up you haven't failed the moment you say screw it I'm done and walk away that's failure so with that said put in an effort keep welding keep working on stuff and things are sticking around for the video

Channel: Making mistakes with Greg

Views: 5,336

Keywords: Making tools, Welding, controlling warping, flux core, how to weld, Making tools, Welding, controlling warping, flux core, how to weld

Id: eDwgJEhyxFo

Length: 31min 13sec (1873 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2023