TFS: How to Notch Tubes Without a Tube Notcher

hey what's up everyone and welcome to another episode of the fabricator with yours truly so a few terms here notching fish mouthing coping saddling these are all industry terms used to describe this series of cuts to make one tube made up to another tube without the gap that's essentially all it is and there's a couple of different ways to do that one is with the use of a tube not sure which is an actual tool you set up in the shop now in 15 years of doing this I've never even owned one so that leads us to the other method which is without the use of a tube not do anything entirely by hand which will allow you to achieve great fitment very close tight tolerances and it often times greater fitment and in less time than it takes to use the tube not sure so first we have our main tube which has no notching in it we have our lower tube that will mate up to it with our standard 90-degree notch the easy one and then we have our kicker tube which has a 10 degree bend in the middle of it and we have no particular order of the angle that we're going to cut out here we're just gonna kind of wing it to make a little bit more realistic so let's get downstairs and start building on the real model so to make this a little bit more realistic and not so typical here I've already fabricated this little stand here it's just a little plug it slides into the tube helps establish I'm gonna try and make it realistically almost kind of like building a roll cage yourself but on the small model here so we have our main tube we have our lower tube we're gonna take that tube made it up to this one very simple this is the easiest one that we're gonna do but first we need to establish our baseline now the baseline is going to be the point at which the bottom of the tube or even the top of the tube is going to be made it this is our visual reference in which to measure so on this we'll just do four inches now if you were doing like a harness bar the door bar or whatever the case is you're gonna need to know where the measurement of that baseline is hopefully you do because they're all very very specific to the certain class of racing that we're going to do so with our baseline in place stick our tube up here all right now taking a really careful look at this we can see that there's a big gap there and that's obviously what the whole purpose of this video is how to eliminate that gap but first we need to establish our face line the face line is going to be the point at which you always come back to for reference or the centerline of this tube at the face of what you're looking at it so at the point of view that you have you need to mark out the center of it now if you'd like you can extend this line to know that you're always going to made it up the exact same place I usually visually reference the base line but sometimes you need to put the extra center line in there but always on the tube that you're notching make sure you have your center line very very important so if we were to cut this out perfectly with a notch or with anything else you'll end up realizing that it's almost never going to happen that the tube will cover exactly half the diameter of the tube it just doesn't happen that way due to wall thicknesses and you know everything else that goes with it plus you have to put a little bevel on there for a good solid weld so if you look carefully it's actually about 1/3 the diameter of the tube is the gap that we need to eliminate 1/3 the diameter tube is a general rule of thumb of which you always want to create your notches for and that's going to create our throat depth now the throat depth is the depth at which the notch will be cut out to how deep the notch will go which in this case 1/3 the diameter of an inch and a half is half an inch so you can do this on the car you can do this off the car whatever the case is just make sure you give yourself enough measurement in there this is our throat depth so from the top of the tube here to our face line and from the bottom of the tube to our face line this is our notch these are the two lines that we just marked out that we need to cut those are when we stick them in the saw we'll put them in there we'll slice them out we're gonna undercut them just to you know because we're gonna have to go through with the grinder and you know do some contouring and you know cut this out and make it fit you know beautifully perfect so let's get over to the saw and get cut you got it in the saw here you're going to want your face line up so that you get your same cuts on both sides so that's what the whole purpose in the face line is to make sure that you always have it held up almost perfect so one of the reasons why I don't actually lock it in it's because when I flip it over I can use the fence here as a guide to make sure that I made it up at the same 45 degrees so they've always said 9 I'll bring this other tube over here so you can see that's almost perfect in all actuality I mean we could just clean it up and go with it right now as it is the fitments pretty good I mean there's there's a lot of roughness in here but we're gonna clean that out with the grinder real quick I just flat disc I usually like to use and reuse my older ones because they have this nice little contour so when you dig into here it cleans it out quite nicely so we're going to round over this huh this edge is just a little bit and then slice all this out of here clean it up nicely you can use a file you can use the flat disc and use whatever but to make sure that I made it up there almost exactly in one I'm going to contour this edge to try and mate with the other tube so let's get this sliced out well that's a much better fit nice and clean so what I'm gonna do is take a few minutes here and I'm gonna clean all this up and get it ready to weld put a couple tacks in check it out see where it ends up but make sure that when we get rid of all these lines and clean these tubes up we've got to make sure that we put our baseline back on here so we know where the tube is gonna sit all right so now it's time for the kicker here and why I say the kicker is because one we have a 10 degree bend in here and two I am NOT going to place this in any particular style form whatever the case is to finish all this off here so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna start at the the lower portion of the tube and we're not going to have a baseline in this one instead we're going to skip ahead to a certain part which is going to be our throat line so you set this up just kind of visually look at it take your marker you draw a line straight across that line is now your throat line so I'm going to unclamp this here now I'm just using these little Pony clamps on here it doesn't ways to clamp a tube down but if you hold this parallel to the lower tube at the position that's going to be sitting at you look from the end of this line to roughly the end of that line and you go right down the center of it which is roughly here so we'll make our mark that is your face line so as we're running around here and we look at this we say how do we know where the angles gonna be in which one that we need to cut and where and all the rest that good stuff well one-third tube diameter which is half of an inch from the throat line to the top of the face line half inch one-third diameter so at this intersection here take one line from the end of one tube to the center of the face line one line from the end of the other tube to the center of the face line and yes we're going to undercut this that's the first one cut then we're gonna do make so let's go stick that and a saw and see where we're moving on to the top portion okay now since this is going to have to be still notched out or whatever the case is to actually place this where it needs to be notice that we're actually got a pretty big gap going on right here and that's kind of a quality assurance there or reassurance that it's correct because once we notch this back of this throat out here and contoured around the tube there this is going to drop straight down anyway so another really interesting lesson you got to learn is if your marks are all on this side of the tube remember where the saw has to cut so if your marks are on this side of the tube that means the tube is going to be sticking out this way and if the base of the saw is on the left side then you're not gonna be able to hold this in there and you know hold it steady with your face line correct and all the rest of that stuff as the as the saw cuts down so we're gonna mark the other side this rule applies to pretty much everything so I'm gonna set it up opposite and we can kind of visually look at this here notice we have the gap down here which is good and we're gonna kind of hold this in place here and make our throat line hey you gotta kind of straighten this out here cuz I'm working a little backwards now now we'll hold this up parallel notice how it all kind of seems to straighten out a little bit and this line gets just a little bit crooked that's good that's another one of those reassurances so just the same as before halfway down the throat line give out right here is our face line and again same rule of thumb one third diameter of the tubing which in this case is half of an inch now we go from throat line to the intersection of the face line and throw line face line to the throat line same as before [Applause] so we'll put this up here in the first glance you're gonna look at it and say oh no I screwed up well actually you didn't because this extreme angle right here needs to be cut out with the grinder still now this is a little bit crazy but notice how I've got the base of it mounted flat out here correctly and this hasn't been notched out either so when we actually stick this on here let me say about where it's gonna land we're we're actually looking really close to where we need to be so what we're gonna do is take the grinder cut out those throats contour this around make sure these edges and these throats actually line up where they need to be and hopefully we'll get it right pretty quickly right Mossad I just kind of snapped right in that's a clear indication that we pretty much nailed it gaps aren't too insane like they used to be I might have a little bit of trimming still yet to do in that throat but we'll worry about that when we get to the top about the correct fit and down below but up top here the idea is to take this tube slide it that way to make it actually fit because this gap up here if we were to actually you know throw it this out and then bring it back up or whatever the case is that would change the angle down below so the idea is to just slide the tube forward so in order to do that we're gonna actually have to over cut from our throat line and bring that inner throat down just a little bit more and we're talking only fractions here so once you get the experience in the time doing this you'll you'll finally get it you know you'll you'll know how much to cut and where so we're just gonna put in a little reference line there we'll start cutting that one out I remember before when I mentioned that snap fit notice I don't have anything actually holding this on there it's only held in by itself which is nice clean perfect fit so get this set up correctly laid out attack there it is so what do we actually take away from this video well there's a couple of things here one it's entirely possible we got by hand without the use of toon underachieve these same angles who would with a tube hunter now the second part this is entirely overview this practice makes perfect okay so the more you practice this the better you get at it the quicker you will be and when I say quicker you can actually achieve these same angles just as we did in this video without the use of the tube doctor and be quicker than using a tube doctor that's the most beautiful part now it's even better than that one if you don't have a to doctor then we'll go on multiple planes as well as multiple angles you're gonna have to do it by hand anyway so here's the thing the better you can get out the quicker you get out of it the more angles you can achieve without the tube doctor keep practicing most importantly keep practicing then you can eventually even find out that you will get your perfect fit every single time now one thing I suggest is make this model over and over again make a dozen models like this make one similar to this make ones with different beds different angles and keep practicing and keep trying at it the more you practice the better you're gonna become at it that's all I have for this episode of the fabricator thanks for checking it out we'll see you on the next project

Channel: The Fabrication Series

Views: 4,772,172

Rating: 4.8200922 out of 5

Keywords: tube notching, Tube coping, fish mouthing, tube saddling, saddle, notch, cope, fish mouth, tubing, roll cage, tube, notcher, DOM, Metal Fabrication (Industry), hand, The Fabricator, The Fabricator Series, TFS, @The.Fabrcator, Racing, Roll Cage, How To

Id: mHBanmfn_CA

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/DeleteFromUsers]

Exhausting. When I did my apprenticeship as a tool and die maker, all we could use was a drill press for holes, and a hacksaw and files for surfaces. Oh and solid rivets to join. For 6 weeks at the beginning.

Neat to see how to do it that way but, like if your livelihood depends on it, invest.

[u/K20CRX]

Thank you for this

[u/mingy]

Awesome video!

[u/three_word_reply]

I've done this a lot. I don't mess with the other lines, just give yourself a pipe center line, mark it 180° out, and make sure the blade catches the mark.

[u/informatician]

What's the purpose of the 10 degree bend in the tube? Why not make it straight?