Mobile Plasma cutting

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] I've had a problem with vertebra "C-2" in my neck for years and years. The best way to get my neck out of place is to flip a helmet too vigorously, so if anyone needs an auto-darkening helmet, it would be me. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Dave, For many people there is a better eye and one not as good. Then there is usually one eye dominant, as in left eyed or right eyed. If you are lucky your good eye is dominant and is the same as your handedness, as in right handed person with best eye on the right and right eye dominant. (best shooting combination too)

Anyway, close your "good" eye before striking the arc with the auto darkening helmet if you fear getting flashed due to a failure of technology. Give your pain in the neck a rest!

Oh, by the way, I'm all screwed up. I'm right handed, left eye dominant, and my right eye is the good eye. You tend to see fewer olympic class shooters with the arrangement I have. Yet I qualified as Expert Marksman both left and right handed and did pretty fair before my eyes got so old and started demanding good optics for fine work on targets.

Hey, you can buy good functioning auto-darkening shields for under $50. Some are solar powered and don't use batteries (my batteries last for several years so it isn't a big deal.)

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] I finally gave in and got a cell phone a week ago. I swore off cell phones when I got out of "the biz" and didn't think I needed one any more since we moved to cornville and seemingly had zero use for any such high-tech machinery. The reality was that my life got more complicated than I ever expected, and I still needed a cell phone so got another one [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] It's the same way with welding helmets. I just HAVE to go and get a good auto-darkness model and get into the 21st century. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Dave, I don't want you to feel any pressure. If you aren't comfortable with the high tech, consider simpler alternatives.

When I was in grade school I got a resistance welder (heater coil in series with 120VAC plug and cord. It had an electrode holder. This marvel cost 25 cents at an auction. I made a helmet out of an empty Kleenex box held on my head with rubber bands. I cut a rectangular opening and affixed a welding glass I had found. I didn't have any rod so I split wooden pencils to get the graphite-clay rod (lead.) I used it to burn holes in tin cans and melt foreign coins. The pressure from the ill fit hurt my nose so I cut a flap to relieve the pressure and got a good arc (sun) burn on the end of my nose. For extra power I figured out how to use two outlets on different breakers to run it on 240 volts.

If this is still too high tech for you take a piece of glass and hold it above a lamp with the wick too far out and smoke coat the glass. This layer of lamp black can be adjusted darker and darker untill you get the shade you want. Be careful with any nose pressure relief holes. Be sure you don't cook your nose with UV.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] And I thought that I had a PhD in jury-rigging! YEEK! Pat, that beats just about anything that I have ever heard. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] SPEAKING OF 120V WELDERS...... [img]/forums/images/icons/frown.gif[/img] Here is the reality of those "convenient" little buzz boxes: VERY FEW std outlets in the wall will support those welders. Either the wiring is too small or it is poorly connected to the outlet, or both. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Dave, Of course my little auction special $.25 "resistance" welder had no controls and no transformer. You just plugged it in attached the alligator clip "ground clamp" to something conductive and put a rod (or in my case the pencil lead) in the electrode holder and go for it. I never welded anything with it, just cut up tin cans and melted foreign coins.

I did learn about the two "legs" of 120VAC that comprise 240VAC when I was trying to BOOST my power by plugging into two outlets. Get it wrong and you pop a breaker. Use two outlets on the same breaker and you don't gain voltage just ampacity.

I didn't actually weld anythig until in my free lance consultant phase and got hired to move a prototype portable battery operated welder from the prototype stage through a pre-production run toward manufacturability.

I have never popped a house breaker with my Lincoln Weld Pak 100 MIG but have put the welder itself into thermal shutdown a jillion times by exceeding its duty cycle capability. Luckily it self protects itself or it would have been toast a long time ago.

Wrong time and place to recount them but my jury rigging experiences make the little welder story pale by comparison. Ok a small taste...

Broke the front left main leaf of the leaf spring and blew out the rear end of a 4X4 deep in Baja where it was a life threatening experience not just an inconvenience. Came home by "splinting the spring pak with sticks and wrapping with rope and clamping the spring together with Vice Grips. Made it hundreds of miles back to San Diego.




[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[CJDave]

[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Pat, the wanna-be author in me has always wanted to write a book......more like compile actually.....titled: "Oklahoma Fixes"; so titled out of respect for the many creative ways that genuine Okies that came out to Californey in the thirties came up with to get yet one more mile out of the 1922 Dodge. Bacon rind in the rod bearings, oatmeal in the radiator, Prince Albert tobacco cans for shims, the list is endless. I once used an "Oklahoma Fix" that I learnd from a genuine Okie to patch a Chevy 350 engine that had spun a rod bearing and as such was able to bring that vehicle WITH a trailer behind it 650 miles home over two impressive mountain ranges. Your Baja fix is typical of the ingenuity that circumstances often bring out. The war diaries of German U-Boats are replete with incredifixes that young men from the industrial areas of Germany performed in order to get the damaged boats that they were on back to Lorient, or St Nazaire or Brest.....somehow....[img]/forums/images/icons/cool.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Dave, Allow me to (try, you probably already know about it) add one. My recently visiting WWII vet friend told me while he was here of a time when his differential was about to go out and needed to "make it home" from quite a distance. An old time mechanic sent him to the store for bananas. The mech stuffed the diff totally full of bananas and he made it all the way with no problems.

Neccessity being the mother of invention, 3rd world mechs have come up with some pretty creative fixes. My experience is from Mexico but I'm sure similar abounds around the globe. I have read about the Cubans keeping the old U.S. cars running without access to normal supply chains.

A lot of folks go beyond, way beyond, cleaning distributor points with the abrasive match striking surface of a paper matchbook and then gapping the points with the thickness of the matchbook as a feeler gage.

Some day I may tell you about performing breath hold dives to go under my sailboat with a hand crank drill to drill "dimples" in the bronze cutless bearing so allen head set screws will index and hold the bearing inside the strut that supports the prop shaft. This while the Catalina Island "Glass Bottom" tourist boat is manuvering around making waves and churning air into the water reducing visibility to "braile" conditions.

All this because during repairs in a San Diego boat yard one yahoo thought the other yahoo put the set screws in the new bearing and vice versa as they left for the BIG FRIDAY LUNCH. So I am motoring at 0200 in the Long Beach shipping channel enroute to Catalina Island when the bearing came out of the strut and I had to shut the engine off before it tore the strut out of the boat and sank it.

I didn't have any tobacco tins for shims but I did have a cigar box of shim stock, monel, stainless, bronze in various thicknesses. I successfully shimmed the bearing, reinserted it, drilled the dimples withough ruining the threads, and got the set screws dogged down. I also had a "conversation" over the radio with the owner of the boat yard.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]