Speed Square Hack for Every Welder

okay so when I first started getting into structural steel layout in fabrication one of the problems always ran into is my square my speed squared which I like to use quite a bit it doesn't fit inside the web of an 8-inch eye beam so one thing one of the old-timers kind of taught me was now your phone's not broke I'm just messing with you we're just gonna make a couple modifications to this and it's gonna turn out to be a really handy tool for you I use it quite a bit at the house I use a lot around here in the wall comm shop some of the fabrication bills you might have already seen it I'm gonna show you how to make it so what I've done is I've aligned the back gauge to a 45 degree angle to the blade so when I come down I'm gonna be right up against this manufactured edge here I don't want to take this edge off okay I'm just gonna take this part off and then we're gonna clean it all up so because I can't use the the regular clamping mechanism in here I've clamped this to the table using one of the fireball clamps I put a shim up underneath here which is the same thickness as the distance of the edge to the square so this whole square is sitting completely flat and I've clamped it back here also this way when I cut through everything stays in place you want to go nice and slow with this take your time and remember don't take any of the material out of this area I want to maintain all of that material I don't I don't want to scratch it if I can avoid it so now I have some 400 grit sandpaper and you want to get yourself a good flat surface and I'm just going to kind of clean up the burrs and then I'll clean up the corners here with a file but I'm just gonna kind of smooth this out just a little bit I want to make sure it's flat that way everything is nice and even you don't stay in one area down any further than the rest just want to knock that sharp edge off right here you don't have to do a whole lot of work on remember it's aluminum so it's it's pretty soft as it is so you want to make slow methodical strokes with your file same thing over here just knocking the burr off and not trying to remove a bunch of material just enough to keep that burr off and then I'll just clean this edge up here and I'm just gonna sand this down just a little bit more now you'll notice the corners of these are square on the inside of an i-beam where that flange meets the web you have a little radius in there so I'm just gonna cope just a small radius on here and that way it'll once we put it inside the i-beam you'll see exactly what I'm talking about but it's gonna make your life a lot easier if you have to lay out smaller beams clip spacing hole spacing all that good stuff because all the tools we use are square but that edge on the inside where you really have to pull from it's got like a small radius to it just gonna make your life a lot easier so now I'm just gonna take a nickel you can use a washer whatever you got I mean if you have like a small circle stencil you can use that too but about the size of a nickel I'm gonna go right up to this edge here and I like using a nickel because it's the same width as the the bottom piece here and I'm just gonna take a little scribe you can use and I'm gonna mark these areas here a little bit overkill maybe but you know I've had the same square for the past 10 years and it served me well so I'm gonna take a little time putting this thing together so now I just have this radius edge and I'm just gonna knock that off with a grinder clean it back up with a file and we'll be good to go so I have a worn out flapper wheel here and I'm using a worn out one intentionally I don't take too much material awesome just gonna take it down pretty close to the line I'll clean everything up with a file on the sandpaper alright so I stood this trick a couple times before but if you take the piece of soapstone or sidewalk chalk kind of load your file this acts almost as a cutting lubricant and prevents the metal metal shavings from clogging up your file and loading it up and notice how I didn't I didn't take any off the back I'm gonna keep that area right there okay so I'm pretty much down to that edge so we're down to about five and an eighth whereas we came from seven inch square pretty much has all the the same functions your average Walter is gonna use this for I got 90 degrees on one side 45 on the other and we're good to go let's go ahead and see if it fits back in the beam and if we can do a clip layout alright so here's the original square obviously it's not gonna fit in the w8 beam but if we go down here to this W 10 you can see that in the corner it doesn't quite sit right so your marks can be thrown off ever so slightly and if you're trying to make a straight cut in here you're trying to line up four bolts you don't want to make any errors in here so that's why you could take this one and radius it just like we have this one and then it fits right in that corner okay so everything is nice and square you don't have to mess with it a lot you know just make your mark in there make your mark everything lines up nice and easy okay then you can rotate it up in this corner same thing over here and I can transfer my marks all the way around the i-beam but with this one you can't do that kind of you lose a little bit trying to get it squared up just radius that corner off right this thing works great for i-beams like I said I've had the same one been carrying around for you know the past 10 years works good you know when you're working on small stuff - you're not trying to handle this this big piece this is a little bit smaller fits in your hand real nice and easy just overall I don't know empire you guys might want to consider looking into making these pretty good tools alright so on behalf of the weld comm crew we hope you guys have a happy Thanksgiving safe productive holiday and until next time make every well better than your last

Channel: Weld.com

Views: 1,474,891

Keywords: welder, speed square, welding, weld.com, mig monday, tig time, how to weld, learn how to weld, speed sqaure, speed square ff7, speed square basics, speed square tricks, speed square angles, speed sqaure ff7, speed sqaure basics, speed sqaure tricks, Speed sqaure angles, welder man, welder job

Id: S5HHwqknV5g

Length: 5min 59sec (359 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 27 2019