Making Big Money Doing Small Welding Jobs! $1000+ / Day!

hey I'm Chris heffer make everything and today I'm going to talk to you about how I make good money doing small TIG welding jobs out in the field and here in my shop check it out [Music] [Applause] so when I opened my shop I focused on being sort of a woodworker and a carpenter that's how I kind of learned along the way in the trades and that was really what I had experience in and as I got better at metalworking got more experience with welding I found that opening up that side of my business and making myself available to do small really non-structural repairs really brought in a lot of work now most people can kind of try or at least they are willing to attempt to fix something made out of wood in their house you know with using kind of regular Big Box store materials but when it comes to welding and metal working they really don't even know who to call at least in my area there's a couple of metal shops nearby but they really only do big jobs so small repair stuff small welding in the shop small metal fabricating jobs they're really kind of a niche thing and there isn't anyone at least in my area that can fill that Niche now I've talked to a lot of other people a lot of other makers around and a lot of them feel the same way that welding jobs are really the thing that kind of helps them pay their bills now in all the things that I've done in woodworking cabinet making you know job management stuff like that the only thing that no one's ever really negotiated pricing with me on is welding and metal work because it's so kind of far out of bounds so I'm going to go through a small welding job that I did and I'm going to break down what I charge and how I did it in order to make a couple thousand dollars on basically two days worth of work on a very small non-structural welding job so let's get into it so I'm starting off at the client's house as you can see the railing on the left side of the screen is sort of floating in Dead Space I think it landed in a piece of wood originally so I'm using a battery powered Porta Band Here a portable bandsaw to cut that railing and inevitably I'm going to be moving it in about three inches onto a discussion plate that I'm gonna have to fabricate in the shop you can kind of see what I'm going for there I Mark what I can in the field and then head back to the shop So after talking with the client the first thing I had to do was cut that railing the lower railing which had to be shortened so that the railing would hit the corner of the wall now the railing on the second floor which I don't have video of I made an actual live template of so I put this against the railing which was all welded to the staircase so I couldn't take it off with me I traced it with a sharpie and I left some notes on I brought this with me to the shop and you'll see me use this later on in the video when I go to make the second section so back at the shop you can see the railing piece that I cut off now the goal here is going to be to cut the three inches of railing off of this to shorten this whole section and then allow the entire rail to be pushed in without having to refabricate the whole thing now I'm using my table in a little bit of an unorthodox way here by actually clamping to the side with that one two three block but this is going to allow me to work vertically and sort of just help me lay this out in a way that is cohesive and easy for me to control make the Cuffs nice and square and also see any fault that might come up as I'm sort of prepping this I'm using this tool which you may not have seen before but that's a pipe polishing tool it's an attachment actually on just a variable speed battery operated grinder the attachment's about 50 bucks and the Grinders about 200 but it's been really great and I've used it a lot on projects like this you can see there I'm using one inch bar to try to make a bung but it's a little bit too small so I dig through my shop and I find this piece of black pipe that more perfectly fits inside the railing now the goal here is I want to have a bung basically a little piece inside the two sections of rail that I'm welding back together so that the structure while my weld is going to bond them there's a second layer of protection inside there God forbid my weld were to fail there's a solid piece of material so this railing really can't go anywhere once it's done since this was sort of a piece of scrap material I had to get all the rust off of it but it's going to fit perfectly so that's what I'm going to choose to use now I do a little bit more of the pipe polishing there and I get that all prepped and then I can leave some punch marks and drill holes because what I'm going to do here is I'm going to plug weld that railing piece to the actual bung material now a plug weld is pretty simple and straightforward and if you've ever done metal working you're probably familiar with them but it's something that I think a lot of people under utilize in this application now I could obviously weld the edge of the pipe but then I'm going to have to contend with this weld when I go for a tight fit up if I do a plug weld no one will ever actually see that weld once it's ground flat and since this bung is really only in there to kind of use for alignment and extra strength it doesn't need to be welded all the way around once this whole piece is welded in place and I penetrate that weld well with the TIG welder later it's going to hit the bung and it's going to keep everything perfectly locked in place so I can grind off all these welds and it's basically like they were never there and this piece is ready to sort of be fit up and go into the next section so the next thing to do is going to be to make the escutcheon plate that's going to hit the wall it's pretty straightforward I'm gonna basically be drilling some holes with the hole saw and laying this out in a way that the railings actually will fit through it and I can weld them from the back so now I want to talk a little bit about the way that I kind of charge for this job now doing all this work cutting and welding and fabricating all this plate in the shop took basically an entire day and the way that I price jobs like this is I actually have basically like a day rate for the shop just to exist right and I think it's important to have that sort of set up in your business model if you're going to do this kind of work and you rent space basically what I'm saying is take my monthly expenses to run the shop and then divide those by the 30 days in a month add in for some consumables in this case I'm using welding wire and you know this obviously this carbide drill bit and that's how I come up with about a 300 per day shop rate just to utilize the shop and that doesn't include my time so if something takes an entire day in the shop and I want to charge a hundred dollars an hour I need to add the 300 shop cost to that at the end of the day for basically the use of my tools and the space electricity and all that stuff so in this case I am charging a hundred dollars an hour for welding and fabricating that's my normal rate for something like this that doesn't need to be rushed I can charge less or more depending on what the project is or something like this that I really need to pay attention to it's a hundred dollar hourly rate plus the 300 shop time and I keep track of my time in a couple of different ways but when I'm filming a project you actually have the benefit of the clips being time stamped so I know when I started and when I finished so now that the first discussion plate is done I'm working on the second one which is running off that live template that I mentioned earlier you can see how I traced those pieces of tube and then I transferred those marks onto the piece of Steel and then I'm marking some holes now after that plate is finished to drill mounting holes in the corners which will then get countersunk so that these things can get screwed into the walls this is pretty simple and one of the things that I can kind of recommend here is think outside the box when you're looking for hole saws I wound up using a metric sized hole saw which got me a better tolerance fit than any of the standard size hole saws that I could find which is going to allow this whole thing to just look that much better now the discussion plates are done I want to weld them in the shop I don't want to have to weld them in the field so I'm doing this sort of complicated setup with these blocks on my strong hand fixture table and what this is going to allow me to do is actually lay these out and set this up perfectly but also weld it from the back side and you'll notice I'm doing all the welding in the shop is being done with a MIG welder but when I actually get on site I'm going to have to switch to a TIG welder because I need something that isn't going to have any Sparks and it's going to be a lot cleaner and there's going to be less grinding and fixing but for me to mig weld in the shop is just a lot faster and easier and I just I'm a little more proficient in it so I choose to do the MIG welding when I can and then the TIG welding when I have to do something that's a little more finer of a finish I use that pipe polisher again to get everything all cleaned up and nice and then you can see I clamped to these blocks and I pushed the discussion plate flat down and put a little bit of clamping force on it which is going to allow me to get underneath it and weld it from the back side I also spray some anti-spatter on there to try to keep the spatter off the side of my table and once I get these pieces tacked and I feel like they're not going to move I can go ahead and really weld around the back the back and then I can grind them flat you can see I just have a couple tacks and then I'm able to go through and really weld in the whole rest of the circumference of the tube and then I just go in and grind those nice and flush so they're not going to be in my way when I go to bolt these to the wall make sure everything's still straight and flat and then I can just do a little bit more prep and clean up around any areas that need to be removed of paint and I can move on to the other discussion plate so now for the second set of railing I actually have to install some pre-cut miters on the discussion plate and then line them up with the edge of the railing when I get to the site now the second railing which you haven't seen yet is at the top of a landing on the third floor and it's welded to the actual staircase so I can't take the railing down and work on it in the shop and it had a square end to it when I got there so what I did was I'm actually going I'm planning on cutting some miters in the field so that I can line up with these miters that I'm cutting on these little pieces that'll be welded to the discussion plate you've probably seen in my shop I have a couple different ways to cut metal but in this case I like to use the little portaband uh sort of bench top version it's just easy when you're cutting small pieces of tube like this and it works out pretty well you can see in this case I'm using a pretty large variety of different layout tools and fixture tools and clamping tools and all this stuff sort of was accumulated over years of doing this type of work and it it does add to the cost of working with me you know I have these expensive and nice tools which provide me with really great results and as a result of that I charge maybe more than someone else but by no means because I have nice tools that make it easier should I be charging less you know there's expertise that's involved with that you know you you hire professionals to do a professional job and that's where I've developed the rates that I have and I provide what I think are really great result now you can see here I'm clamping everything and Welding from the back side grinding everything flat and flush and then from there this piece will be ready to go you know obviously making this discussion plate was a lot easier but there's a lot more fit up that'll have to be done in the field so it kind of balances itself out the last thing I do before I leave is I put some clean metal primer on the back of both of the discussion plates because once these get installed they're likely not going to come off again and I don't want them to ever corrode and leave any rust staining on the wall so now that all the work in the shop is done like I said it took basically an entire day to do that work I can pack all my stuff up and bring it over to the job site itself now to go there and do this work I'm going to need to bring my whole TIG welding setup I have to bring my TIG machine I have to bring a bottle I have to bring clamps I have to bring protection I got to bring a fireproof blanket a fire extinguisher my hood all the stuff that I need it's a lot it's like almost a half a truck worth of equipment just to go and do basically six small welds now because of that obviously there's a cost associated with it I've also decided that I will grind the welds but I'm not going to go ahead and do any filler work because there is a painter coming in and he has to fill a bunch of gaps also along the way so now back on site you can see the railing that I cut off and the big thing here is going to be making sure I don't do any damage to the existing setup so the stair treads have already been installed they're unfinished so far but I still don't want to get any of that metal dust in there because if it gets wet it can corrode can get embedded in the wood and then a little bit of water you'll get rough spots I use that pipe polishing tool again to clean the end of that railing up and get it prepped and then you can see how nice of a fit up I got by using those bunks the next thing is going to be actually installing some screws into the wall which will lock the discussion plate and then I can start my TIG welding and my tacking so I brought my Lincoln Electric Square wave 200 on site it's a nice portable machine and what I really like about it is that it's 110 or 220 so in this case there's only like one extension cord set up in the house during pre-construction and construction work so I just basically plug it into a regular extension cord and I run it on a relatively low amperage to weld this 1 8 tube I'm using a band file there to sort of clean things up as I go and you can see the welding position here is pretty awkward it's very very low it's very hard to get underneath it and it's also pretty bright out and in the room so I'm getting you know a lot of glare in my hood it's just a generally kind of tricky Condition it's definitely not like welding in the shop now something to consider if you're going to do site work like this is the amount of protection that you need to do in order to not do any damage and cost yourself any money you can see I've got a moving blanket I've got plastic drop cloths and right now I'm working on a subfloor so it's actually not so bad for me to worry you know I don't have to worry about getting any metal dust on that subfloor I can vacuum everything up but on the second floor I'm going to be working above a finished wood floor which I'm going to have to be a lot more careful of just to make sure that I don't leave any rust rings so using a combination of the pipe polishing attachment and then a regular angle grinder I'm able to grind out all the welds that I've put in and clean up this railing so that it looks perfectly seamless now obviously if you know anything about building you know this railing is not to code the space between those horizontal bars it's definitely too large for a two code condition but because this is pre-existing non-conforming the house can continue to be this way and the railing is inevitably safer than it was when I started because now that discussion plate is hitting the wall and it's not floating in space now I made sure to weld the back side and as I'm grinding I'm finding little pits and holes that I'm making sure that I fill but this railing has a bunch of other little gaps that the painter is going to have to fill with probably like a Bondo or body filler so I'm not super worried about going overboard here trying to make the rail 110 perfect because once it gets painted and filled it's going to all be smoothed out and then the client may actually do a topical treatment to it as well with some sort of leather fabric that bottom rail is all done and now I can move upstairs to the really tricky one so you can see the miters that are already cut on that top rail now I did those in advance and then I cut the miters for this discussion in the field but you can see how much tuning I'm going to have to do here to get it fit so as I start working this thing in I can kind of bend the rail out as I want I can kind of force things and maneuver them away but at the end of the day I need the discussion plate to be level so I have to be careful now I flipped the belt around on the pipe polishing tool which works okay and it helps you get into sort of harder to reach places but at the end of the day I still need to get all the paint off the ends of this so I'm not burning it when I'm TIG welding it now this railing was actually recently painted I guess the painter didn't realize that I was coming so he's just gonna have to come back and clean it up and I put Ram Board down all around me and underneath the actual staircase you can see down below and where I'm kneeling so that I could make sure that everything stays nice and clean when it comes to the actual welding I set up a plastic drop cloth and I make sure that I tape off my Ram Board so that I don't allow any Sparks or anything to get down and burn any of the pre-finished wood I also have a fireproof proof blanket around a kind of underneath me out of frame and I have this moving blanket here so that just in case anything kind of flies away it gets captured before it hits even the Ram Board I don't want any Sparks to hit the Ram Board that could potentially you know burn that and then potentially burn the floor now again this is a super awkward weld position I'm basically sitting on the ground sitting on the welder just trying to get in a spot where I can see what I'm doing and also pulse the pedal as I go it was very difficult to get this all welded accurately and very cleanly so that you wouldn't see any gaps kneeling on the ground and welding and tip using the tig pedal with your knee can be really tricky but once you get the hang of it it actually can you know be a nice way to get work done as opposed to like leaning over and I'm actually using this thing called the kneel it it's like a rolling set of knee pads that I've got recently and I actually like using it a lot when it comes to doing TIG welding work because you can take out one of the knee pads and use your knee to pulse the pedal and it works out great it's a lot more comfortable now again I start doing a little bit of grinding and then once I realize where I need to fill back in kind of set the welder back up and continue to go you can see me using my knee on the pedal here welding that bottom section now this is all the way out the top of the stairs on like the third or fourth floor so you know the scrutiny on this railing is not going to be high you're not probably not going to even see it that often but I still want to do a really good job and make those miters look really really clean and like they were done in the original fabrication so now with that discussion plate installed the miters all welded up nice and sharp and really clean I go back in with the van file clean up just a little bit more of that welded corner and that's pretty much it this railing is done and all in all the site work probably took me five or six hours and then add another hour for setup and then another hour for breakdown I'm pretty happy with the way these miters came out and the discussion plate looks great so after welding up those last three miters this is all done uh this can be painted and overall I think it came out really great I'm super happy with it and the client is happy that now they have railings that look cohesive with the rest of their house now these railings originally like I mentioned must have died into like a block of wood or something because they were just floating in space now they have a nice clean miter on them they're tied back into the wall on the upper section and the lower section they're tied actually into a steel beam with some screws so that's going to Safe off that entire area now the railings aren't code normal code is I think it's a four inch ball has to not be able to fit through the spindles but they are pre-existing non-conforming railing so that's on the client to sort of decide what they want to do with it now as I mentioned this basically took an entire day in the shop and then about a half a day in the field plus or minus you know set up and breakdown so the way that I broke that out in the video showing how much I charge basically brought me to about a 2000 dollar fee to do this welding now I know that seems like a lot of money for what is basically a small job but it's a very specialized thing that involved a lot of different tools a lot of those tools are very expensive and it's also the ability and the willingness to actually pack up all my stuff and go take the risk to go and weld in someone else's house right any grinding marks anything that could have gone wrong uh also just dragging my stuff up three flights of stairs to the ceiling there's a premium for that so you know if you think I charge too much maybe you're not charging enough I know that I spoke to another metal shop and I told them how much I charge a friend of mine and he told me that I didn't charge even close to enough considering that I not only had to weld the stuff in the field but I also had to do a whole bunch of sort of specialized fabricating and really make a nice clean discussion plate and use a bunch of different types of material I really enjoy doing small projects like that but typically I try to keep myself into just fabricating the shop and just giving stuff to a client that they have to deal with I don't really like lugging my stuff around but it does pay well and I'm happy to do that kind of work just because it gives me a little bit more experience in that area and helps me kind of understand and adapt to Future problems that might come along now I'm not the greatest TIG welder in the world but I was able to get really nice welds on that and once everything was grounded once it's all painted it's going to look awesome I hope this video was helpful and I hope it inspired you to maybe take on some more of these jobs now again I'm not saying that an amateur welder should go and put up a building but the railings that I welded with the bung inside are going to be very very safe I have no question no doubt in my mind that they're not going to like fall apart and I think this is well within the range of a moderately skilled TIG welder or even a MIG welder now the reason I TIG welded this instead of MiG welding it was because I didn't want those Sparks going everywhere running all over this house I wanted this to be a very low impact there were finished floors all around me so I had to make sure I had blankets and plastic and everything that would keep any of that potentially rusting metal dust out of the finished spaces so I hope you enjoyed this video if you want to see what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis follow me right here on Instagram give it a thumbs up subscribe to my channel for more videos like this and I hope to see you on the next one thanks

Channel: Make Everything

Views: 724,802

Keywords: Weld, welding, make money welding, how to make money tig welding, how to weld, diy welding, how to weld a railing, how to grind metal, how to polish steel, how to grind steel, Lincoln electric, Lincoln welding, welding business, tig welding, welding hourly rate, maker business, fabricator, how to make money mig welding, pipeline, tig, how to tig, maker, make everything, square wave 200, strong hand tools, fixture table, side hustle, welding hustle, hourly rate, square wave, mig

Id: vRWk82ZfR8g

Length: 21min 48sec (1308 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2023