Sunday 23 November 2014

WELDING/METAL ROLLING ATTEMPT

As all of the designs I am considering involve the same mild steel construction and rolled sheet metal techniques, I began practising MIG welding.

Using my dad's angle grinder with a thin metal cutting disk in, it was fairly easy to cut rectangles out of the sheet metal. Using the sheet metal roller lowering the top roller by a half turn at a time, it was easy and simple to roll a tube which could be removed from the roller by detaching the top roller. I then (attempted to) MIG welded the gap to form a solid tube.
From looking at how roll cones cones/frustums (as opposed to tubes), the technique is the same; the shape of the material that is being rolled determines the shape of the cone. I will need to design nets and find a way of making these into full-size templates. I should be able to cut out these nets using an angle grinder again.


I originally tried welding with small strips. However I found this often burnt through the metal leaving a hole. I then started welding with small beads 'stitching' the weld.

From inspecting my welds, first hand comments from dad (who can weld and has had such jobs in the past) and research into what makes a good weld, I found that mine had poor penetration and protruding beads that needed grinding down; these mean the joint is relatively weak and basically, not good enough...I would like to construct the whole pulsejet myself so this will need work.

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