The Ultimate Welding and Metal Fabrication Fixture Table Build!

what's going on guys my name is brandon and one of the very first things that you're going to want to do when you pick up welding and you're starting out is you're going to want a nice welding and fabrication table well that's what we're going to be working on today it's going to be budget minded so stick around [Music] whenever you're welding or you're doing fabrication work it's always nice to be able to have your piece clamp down nice and tight it just makes everything so much easier what makes it even better is if you have a fabrication table where you can have some options of clamping things down in the center of the table you can clamp it down on the edge it just makes things a lot easier but if you guys have ever been in the market to price one out they're pretty expensive if you go to buy one well i've got some budget-minded ideas and i'm going to show you right now my regular viewers you'll know i have this which is my pneumatic lift table it's all adjustable just connect that down to that right there and that lifts it that lowers it it's all adjustable but this is what i work off primarily when i'm welding this surface right here well what makes it difficult one is that i can't really get a clamp on the edge so what i have is like a little hard piece of rubber underneath this plate that just kind of keeps it up enough so i can get a finger on there so i can just get the edge of like a pair of vice grips but that doesn't overly work that great if you're trying to clamp something up and fixture it yeah i could probably put a uh like a block underneath it to raise it up and i could clamp it but i also have issues when i try to clamp something down in the middle and what prompted me to do that is a recent video that we did where we tried to test how strong our weld was when we broke the handle off a cast iron pan and what i wanted to do is clamp the pan down so we could hang weight off the handle and i ended up having to put a piece of wood across the top and it just made it real difficult to try to clamp the pan down it didn't need to be as difficult as it was becoming if you want to check out that video i'll put a link up above so that's what prompted this project here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go along this table and i'm going to punch some 5 8 holes all through it and lay it all out so we can use some different clamps and have different fixture things just like you would see on a prefabricated one the holes are 5 8 that's what we're going to use but as we do it it's going to be important that the holes maintain a 90 degree back and forth because you want to be able to use this also for layout which is also what we're going to do and we'll explain that more here in a little bit but the first thing that we're going to do is set up this so that it's all nice and even with four inch hole pattern but i'm gonna create a jig that will make it perfect every time and i'll show you how we're gonna do that right now and then we can start laying out this i think that's gonna help you guys for for any size table this one here is 30 inches by 30 inches and it's perfect for me it's 3 8 thick and i generally just leave it on here all the time i roll whatever it is i need to up onto this it goes right over it all right i want to bring in real quick and just show you what i'm doing and how i'm doing it uh just so that you guys will have an idea uh what i'm doing so i took the plate it's 30 inches and i divided that all up and what that gave me was just about three inches on each end before i start my first hole okay i just did all the math i'm not going to bore you with that okay once i determined uh where my holes began and then made sure that it's the same on the other end i went through and used a punch which is a spring-loaded punch i'll have links to all this stuff down in the description and i just put a little punch mark into the plate just like that okay and then so that i can see it and didn't lose the mark i colored it with a black marker just so i could get a good visual on it so just like that and i don't know if you can see that but that's where i put a little mark right there and then once i did that all the way across then i took a square just like this and put it along that back edge and i've already checked these edges here and here and there and there and i know that those are square because i checked it with this okay and then i checked it with another square to make sure so then i just line up this is where i'm at over here now so then i just line up here's my punch mark right here line up the edge of that mark on that right there and then i just scribe it using that it's a metal scribe again i'll have links down below and then just just like that now it's kind of faint but you can still see them there's one there and there's one there they're going all the way across what this is going to help me do and then i'm going to go in the other direction while i need to these will be verification marks and the template will help make it perfect every time now i got to start building it this way in hindsight i really didn't have to do these layout marks but i put them down just because i'm kind of a visual learner so if i can see it and i can tell that i'm running off i'll know that i need to change what i'm doing but now i'm just doing a center punch and this is how i get a nice accurate center punch mark stand the punch right up when you're on that mark like that and then hit it and look at that it'll give you a dead center mark every single time and now i'm just continuing on getting all my layout marks done there's going to be a total of 49 holes put into this metal so i've got a piece of three and a half inch wide flat bar it's eighth inch thick and i'm just going to use this as a template to help lay out my holes and these marks that we punched we'll verify that we're on our mark but this should give us a nice consistent repeatable pattern without us skipping off and having any issues so this should keep it perfect i measured it out to be 30 inches long and now i got to do is just cut it off i just have a piece of scrap 2 inch wide by 8 inch flat bar and it just happened to be a 10 inch long scrap and i just marked it literally in half and we'll just chop it in half and you'll see what this is going to be for here in a minute so this is what we got guys i've got that three and a half inch wide plate eighth inch thick and i don't know if you can really see it but these scratched lines in this using this scribe are actually perfectly four inches apart and what i've done is i've come over to my drill press now if you guys haven't seen this uh be sure to check out this build because this is pretty awesome so i picked up the base all of this for 30 bucks off facebook marketplace but it had an actual drill head on it and the drill had the motor was gone the bearings were gone in it somebody had actually wired up the centrifugal mechanism inside and bent that all up so that was all messed up but um a lot of you have commented that have seen the video why don't i put a track here to like pin this in a specific location well the reason for that is is because this table pivots 360 degrees around that post and this actually goes with it this gear so that allows me to be able to turn this mag drill anywhere i want to follow that table i'm not locked in to one actual position and some of you guys have posted well you know that would help hold it onto the drill onto the stand when it's not powered up because this is a magnetic drill it's only sucking itself down to this base and attaching it when the power is on and the magnets on well you're not going to leave it on when it's just sitting idly by and you're not using it so it comes with this strap a lot of times like when we do bridge work we would attach this mag drill overhead in drill holes or even drill holes on its side and you don't want to take a chance of losing it if you lose power below a breaker so you tack you know you attach this strap to the drill into the beam so if you lose power it doesn't just drop and fall off well that's what i'm using that for here is just attaching the strap to that plate so if somebody inadvertently bumps it it's gonna stay attached i've done guys is i brought this up you can see it's a 5 8 hole saw that we have on there and that'll actually go down through the table so we don't have any clearance issues and so that i know that my holes are in a perfect straight line i just clamped a little piece of angle iron right here to the table and that will just give me a nice straight edge so i know that all my holes will be perfectly in line and we're going to drill those into that piece of template that we just made so what i'll do is i'll start out with the easiest one first and that'll be the middle that's just so that we can you know get a good feel for it and now what i've done is is it's got a center point so now all i got to do is line up that little center point of our annular cutter and that's a 5 8 annular cutter to the line we scribed and then i'll just clamp it down here now you can see i'm wearing readers right now when you get a little bit older it really helps and i've got good eyesight but it just helps i wear them when i want to do precision work i put on readers uh and these are like one and a half times readers so well like i think it's like one and a half amplification or something like that so there this also has a inline automatic oiler so you just turn on the valve and it does all the oiling it does everything all by itself for you someone also commented that there's a lot of wiggle in this i have this on rollers on a little roller base that i screwed it down to just so i can move things around when i clean the shop one of the benefits of using a template is i only had to get my whole spacing layout absolutely perfect seven times along this template versus 49 times if i were actually to take the drill bring it over to the metal table and then line up my center point to the punch marks that i made i just think that this was a lot easier way in the long run to do it and it just ensured that i got a better job but again it's only going to be as accurate as my template layout was so i spent a considerable amount of time when i laid out this template making sure that everything was perfect so that i'd get a real nice job when it came time to bring it to the top so is this starting to make a little bit of sense guys you can see how now it's all laid out four inches on center and these will give a nice guide for that annular cutter to slide down through it'll make it perfect i spent a lot of time making sure our template was really good because our holes are only going to be as good as our template and then the punched marks will kind of give us an idea just to confirm that we're where we should be so now what i'm going to do is this is another piece for our template this will all make sense here in a minute now i'm going to weld this to our template then we're going to have another hole four inches back from there and that'll key in our template into our holes i made one small mistake and i actually welded this to the wrong side so i just had to flip it around and uh and i ground all my welds flat because this template might be flipped side to side so now what i'm going to do is the lines that we cut on this template before to lay it out which are actually on the back side one of the reasons why i actually ground down the weld is what we need to do is we gotta extend that line that scribe line that we made into this little plate and it's gonna be four inches back so is that making sense this other hole would be four inches back here and it'll be keyed to make every row the same so by having the welds ground down flat that'll allow the template to sit down nice and smooth and flush to the table and as i do this i'm going to be moving from the back to the front and as i get to my last row i'm going to need to flip the template around so the top will now be the bottom and then i can clamp that to the table and finish my last row it'll make sense as i get closer to the end of the video this is the versatility of this tool i've been telling you about rather than have a drill press and then i have to go and buy a mag drill so i can do portable mag drilling i can just pick this up remove the strap and take it off the table and i'm done now it's in position over here so what i got to do now is i've already punched this center hole here now i got to drill that out 5 8 so it's all keyed together i really love this diy drill press mag base drill stand that we built and we're going to be doing more videos just like this so if you're not subscribed be sure to do so we're going to be having some more upcoming videos very similar to this where we're repurposing making dual purpose tools i get a bunch of ideas i'm going to be doing coming right up so now the template's clamped down to the plate now it's just a matter of lining up the the bit with the hole turn on a magnet now if you guys are wondering how many holes can you drill with one of these annular cutters i will tell you that it's a 5 8 annual cutter from evolution tools from a kit that i got and i drilled 49 holes with it through 3h plate and it was just as sharp when i finished as it was when i started no joke loosen up our clamps we shouldn't need those anymore but maybe we'll use them a little bit now i've got some 5 8 shoulder bolts i ordered those and i'll give you the link down below that fits a 5 8 hole really tight so now we slide our template ahead and line our little tab that we did there we go put that there that template is not going anywhere that's perfect right now and that'll pin it the same place every single time now having that on board oiler makes this really handy because you don't have to mess with bottles of oil or any other thing i'm using option one for cutting fluid it's fairly expensive but it's designed to be cut or diluted with water it just works really well now here you can see i'm on my last set of holes now you can see that the tabs that we put on last are facing away from me so i had to flip that around that's why we had to grind the welds flat so now what i'm going to do is just chamfer off those holes a little bit just got it chucked up in a drill and what that'll do is that'll just make it a lot easier when you're locating these pins they'll just push down a lot easier if you guys are wondering about any of the tools that you see me using i'll have links down below but i guys i just i can't explain it enough i love doing like handy type projects like this this is the type of project right here that doesn't cost you a lot of money but is going to make working in the workshop so much more enjoyable now we got all the holes all chamfered and yeah that's makes it real nice so i'm just so excited about this table so you can see how these bolts are like this just drop a couple in here and there and there and we'll throw another one there and check how simple that is just use these as stops now you can boom you weld that up that makes a perfect 90 degree corner now but the one issue we have now is that we need to be able to hold stuff down now they make clamps for these types of tables but i've got an idea using the same exact pins or the same exact shoulder bolts i picked up these cheap inexpensive clamps at harbor freight they were a real good deal here are the specs on them they're a 12 inch clamp they're heat treated so because they're heat treated they would be hard to cut but what we're going to do is i'm going to cut off this piece right here i'll probably cut it off like right there and weld one of these shoulder bolts right to it and then that'll allow this clamp to drop down into the table and you can clamp it down anywhere you want on here that should work pretty good but ideally you want this cut really straight but i'm not going to use my metal cutting chop saw it would just be too costly to ruin the blade on that or wear it down excessively so i'm going to use a cut off wheel to cut both of those clamps i've measured back 13 inches from this edge then i just made a line using a square so now i've got a straight line to follow and then we'll discard this piece and i'm using a diamond cut off wheel hopefully it doesn't destroy this but if it does replacing this little four and a half inch wheel is a lot cheaper than replacing the 14 inch blade on my dry cut saw i've had real good luck with these disc guys they're from a company called graf black i just like the continuous rim because they don't bounce around like the ones that have the segmented rim on them definitely hard in metal for sure yeah blade's not even warm yeah that's doing a real good job now i'm just beveling back the edges a little bit so i got a place for the weld to go and to grind this back i'm using discs from empire abrasives and if you want some exclusive deals only available on this channel go ahead and click the links down below and get your special promo code for a quality disc for a decent price now that we've got these all beveled now it's time to set up the welder this machine is super easy to set up and it's one of the features that i love about it so much so all you need to know is a few different things when it's set on synergic mode synergic mode means it kind of calculates it all for you you can do it manual but synergic mode just makes it super easy by setting a few parameters so we're using for wire steel wire and to do that you just toggle through pick what you're using stainless you can go all the way down through metal core self-shielded so set it for steel and that right there is material thickness so we're gonna dial in our material thickness well it's well i'm going to set it for quarter inch so that's uh 125. so there we go and now we set our wire thickness so we can set that from anywhere from 23 thousands up to 45 000 wire so i'm using 30 thousandths and then you select your gas you could use straight argon straight co2 i'm using c25 gas so argon and co2 and that's the one i want right there so that's telling me that it's 20.5 volts based on quarter inch material thickness that's in thousands you can also go into the setup menu and set it for standard uh and standard would be in millimeters this is set for us so it displays in thousands and there's some other there's all kinds of other functions that you can do with this it's fully digital oh another good thing too that i like so this right here is your gas purge switch so you just hit this the gas will turn on for 30 seconds that way you can adjust your regulator so i've already turned on the bottle so if i hit this and you come over here you can see i'm at 20 cfh you could adjust it up or down depending on how you wanted it and then you come over here hit it again and it shuts it down if you want to know about this or any of the other products that you see me using you check the links down below and there's also some exclusive deals just to this channel with promo codes that you may not get elsewhere so you save yourself a little bit of money so now that we've got the machine set up let's start welding and all i'm doing here is i'm just kind of like eyeballing it trying to hold it you know vertical plumb in both directions and now i'm just kind of eyeballing it put a little tack on it give it a little bend if it's not quite perfect and then move to the opposing side but yeah these were real simple to weld up and i'm really happy with the results i'm this is something i've wanted for so long guys that uh you know i started out working on a wooden surface work work table just like a lot of you guys and then i added a little metal plate on it and now i've upgraded to this hydraulic lift which i'll always keep this just because this is what i really need for my needs in my workshop and now i have this small nice well i wouldn't say it's portable but it's a small uh fabrication table that i can weld on and i just i'm just super thrilled guys and it didn't cost a whole lot of money to do this i just couldn't be any more happy with this guys i am just totally thrilled about how these came out i am just super happy with them drop them in boom yeah that is awesome those will work just fine all right so we've got some stops we've got our clamps made up and you know down the road we can make up more if we need to but um the only other thing i need left to do is i want to raise up this platform a little bit so it's not just sitting directly on the table kind of like how it was before i had just a little piece of foam under it before so i think we'll maybe put some one inch square tube weld it up underneath probably along the lines of like in here so that there's a little bit of an overhang i'm guessing that way you could clamp stuff to the very outside edge too if you wanted to with like vice grips so i think that's what we'll do so now i'm just going to be cutting each piece of metal i'm picture framing it so it's going to have mitered corners i could have kept them open but this saw has the ability to have the mitered fence and i just think it maybe give a better job plus i wanted to be able to test the accuracy of our new hole layouts because we are going to be able to use our little stop jigs that we made and we're also going to use our clamps so this will be the first time of using that so i made a mistake earlier when i said that the quarter inch was 125 thousands i'm sure you guys were screaming at me but um yeah so now it is set on eighth of an inch that's the material that we're working on eighth of an inch is 125 000 so yeah i don't know what uh what i was thinking and we're already putting these clamps to use guys so mig is really sensitive to like mill scale and rust and if this was anything other than what i'm doing right now basically all this is just a shelf for this to sit on it's going to have really no weight bearing whatsoever it doesn't have to hold anything so i'm not going to get too fancy about filling up the workshop with um rust dust all through the air so uh yeah but just make sure if you're welding something together that you get off the rust and the mill scale because like i said mig is kind of sensitive to it but for something like this it doesn't matter and i'm not going to worry about it and for this i'm using 030 solid 30 000 wire and a lot of you guys ask where i get my wire well i buy it through my local welding supply store and it's their in-house brand but they're nationwide so you should be able to find it all my welding wires that i use are matheson i use that for my flux core and for my solid wire i just love this stuff it just burns so great and i bevel these corners right here guys because i'm going to have to grind these down flush so that when this is sitting down it'll sit flat against the work surface so as i said earlier that flux core is really susceptible to rust it just doesn't like it but this isn't doing anything other than holding that 3 8 plate an inch off my lift table that's it and the reason i went with the one inch square tube is so that i could still push motorcycles up there and the tractor and whatever else i need to put on this and it's not going to interfere with it so you know if i put a two inch tall one well it might be a little difficult pushing a motorcycle up over that plate this way i don't have to take the plate off the bench i can just roll what i need up over it now i'll tell you these are so awesome these clamps and i think what i'm going to do in an upcoming episode is we're going to fabricate some more clamps out of some different stuff do our own thing but so far these harbor freight cheap clamps they're working out awesome for what i need to do in this table i like i said i just can't say enough about it i just went through tack these little uh squares on the bottom now i'm grinding them flush so that it sits flush against my welding table my lift table and yeah i love it that's all there is to it guys i cannot tell you how happy i am how this came out i have wanted a fabrication table for so long but they're just so cost prohibitive especially if you're doing it for like a diy hobby it's hard to justify going out spending several thousand dollars for a huge fabrication table if it's not something you're going to use every day in this piece of equipment necessarily isn't something i use every day but i'll tell you what makes this a budget table is that i pick this up at my local metals metal dealer as a drop and you can buy the drops if you go to your metal dealer by the pound rather than by you know this the piece so i picked this up for super cheap again like i said i picked up some 5 8 shoulder bolts and that is going to be used as stops in the table and some cheap clamps from harbor freight that already work super awesome i'm just really happy with this guys i think it's gonna make fabrication in the shop a lot better it's gonna give me better results everything just works great all the way down to my diy drill press and i'm super impressed with this like i said two tools in one another added bonus with doing stuff like this guys and making your own things is that every time you sit down at this table you're going to have a sense of pride in yourself in a sense a sense of accomplishment that you did something that you know maybe you could go out and just buy it but anyone can do that throw some money at it to actually invest your time in it and put your heart and soul into it it just kind of gives you a sense of pride and that's one of the reasons why i like to redo things on this channel and restore stuff because again anytime you can breathe new life into something or make it better or more useful to you just gives you that sense of pride and satisfaction inside so new videos every friday guys if this is something that you like please don't forget to rate comment and subscribe as i've said before if you're wondering about any of the tools that you see me using you can check the links down below many of them will have exclusive savings only to this channel if you're wondering what i'm working on before it makes it up to youtube you guys can check me out on facebook and on instagram until next week guys i will see you then take care stay safe see ya [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Brandon Lund

Views: 122,589

Rating: 4.900064 out of 5

Keywords: Welding Metal Fabrication Steel Steel Fabrication Metal Welding Mig Welding, welding table, welding table build, fixture table, fixture table build, ultimate welding table, welding, mig welding, diy welding table, diy fixture table, diy fixture table clamps, clamps, clamp, welding clamps, how to, diy, do it yourself, welding projects, welding projects for beginners, The Ultimate Welding and Metal Fabrication Fixture Table Build, Brandon Lund, weld, tools, welding tools, ultimate

Id: hDA4NMQY1J8

Length: 28min 44sec (1724 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020