I needed to machine up a couple of little threaded pieces to mount the bumper etc.  This involves the lathe, so first item was fixing the piping that runs the coolant.  The existing pipe has spent a little too long in the sun and is no longer very happy, liking to split in various places while nobody is in the shed.  So, first job was to redo that.

I also had to resharpen some of the cutting bits.  So around 40mins of setup, to machine 4 little things that took about 10 minutes.  Nice progress so far….  

Then I needed to weld these little pieces into some tubing with the TIG – Which also needed to be fixed…  So I changed the plug on the front, made up a new cable for it, replaced the switch in the handpeice, modified it to fit the new adjuster knob and then taped it back together like all good shed engineers do.

The hand piece now has the start/stop button on it, and it now also has a knob that I can use to adjust the current that the welder is putting out, right from the hand piece, while I’m still welding!  So what you say, well when doing alloy, or even small steel parts like I was about to do, build up heat as you go.  So when you first start welding, you  need  a higher current, then as the heat builds up in the piece that you are welding you need to turn the current down, else it applies too much heat and you melt a hole in it.  I used to have to stop, put the helmet up, go over to the machine, change it, then start welding again.  Now I can do it from the hand piece – without stopping the weld 🙂

So, after all of that, totaling around 3hrs of work, I now had 4 little pieces of metal…

Very impressive for 3hrs work hey!  

I’ll show what these things become in a future post.