Hobby Metal working on a budget and lessons learned - part 1

I am looking to broaden my skills for a couple reasons:

• Hoping that a new hobby will provide relaxation and help reduce day job stress.
• Desire to gain skills which I hope to combine someday in a career change and/or post retirement money maker in the longer term.

In pursuit of this; I started with learning to weld.  This is one item which I didn't skimp after doing lots of research.  I started with a Thermal Dynamics welder and am enjoying it a lot.

There turned out to be a number of side effects to this though.  Some were expected and others less so.  Some of the expected effects are the need for safety related items like a welding jacket, gloves, helmet and such.  Some partially expected effects are the need for a wide variety of clamps, clamp/magnet devices along with wire brushes.

Since I am working with mild steel mostly, I noted a need to keep my work area clean so you end up with a magnetic sweeper and other magnetic pickups.

If you want to work with sheet metal; it only takes a very small project to decide that metal snips are tiring so you pickup electric metal cutting shears/snips.

I am still working with flux core wire only for now and that means pretty big messes with slag and such.  Also, since I am still learning, there tend to be mistakes which must be fixed so it doesn't take long to find a need for an angle grinder.  There is a big need for wire wheel, cut-off and grinder blades to go along with that.

You decide pretty early on to make your own welding cart and.. you find that you need all kinds of things. You try some things that work ok but you recognize that many of those are not what you want to do long term..

• Starting with hacksaw
• Trying out the jig saw with some metal cutting blades
• abrasive blades for the 3" pneumatic cutt-off tool
• Angle grinder with cut-off blades
• And then start eying up metal cutting circular saws, chop saws, iron workers, plasma cutters, metal cutting band saws, etc.  Plasma cutters need a dry source of air and then there are tools which are more common in 208-240V 1 phase or the more industrial 3 phase power.  So you find some nice equipment using 3 phase power and end up with a static phase converter..

Of course, most of the above items are related to cutting only but then you realize the need to make holes.  You may be working with a corded/cordless hand drill initially but you recognize that it is tiring and somewhat difficult to make very many holes in much more than thin sheet metal.

I didn't have a drill press of any sort so I searched around but couldn't make up my mind in regards to a nicer used drill press.  I ended up with a Harbor Freight 12 speed Bench drill press.  It can make holes but don't expect something other than pretty low quality.  The table and base are now stamped steel, the table height adjustment wobbles severely at best and the spindle/chuck has plenty of runout.

One project I am working on is an adapter to attach the Craftsman furrow blade (intended for my tiller) onto the sleeve hitch on my garden tractor.  Not expecting much from this; somewhat an experiment.  It is providing a good learning opportunity and test of the drill press.  Of course, a drill press without bits isn't much use and in this case I needed something in the 5/8" size to handle the pin attachment on the hitch.  Since I didn't have anything that large I ended up buying the Silver and Demming 8 pc drill bit set from Harbor freight.  As others state in reviews of those bits; the box is pretty much trash but the bits work pretty well.  I am running the drill press at the lowest speed (300rpm) and using some tapping oil at the moment.  Based on feed and speeds from "Machine Shop Basics; by Audel", I could go to a higher RPM.  I am inclined to keep it lower for now until I get more comfortable with with the drill press.

Some surprising (or not) initial finding related to the drill press are;

• Quill travel on it is pretty low
• max spindle to table travel is low and with large bits it becomes VERY noticeable 

For my above furrow adapter, the sleeve hitch attachment is only about 4" tall and when combined with the large bits there is not enough room.  Fortunately, I only needed 1/8" of extra clearance for which raising the head of the drill press just a touch worked.  I would not normally do that and if I had needed any more clearance than that; I would have looked for a different way.  I initially thought of simply removing the table but then I would need to build a (short) platform since there isn't enough quill travel to make up that extra distance.  I think what I will end up doing is watch for a reasonably nice but low profile mill/drill vice.  I think this attached to the slots on the drill press base may give me a working alternative but I will likely be going back/forth with attaching the table for the height adjustment.  Long term I would like to justify either a mill/drill press combo or a full mill of reasonable size.

Next on the lessons learned was; how do I immobilize the work during drilling?  I came up with a reasonable solution which included 2 small "super strut" angle brackets bolted to the table slots with part of the work under the edges of those and then a bolt between the 2 angle brackets which took up slack and helped keep things from shifting.  Again, a mill/drill vise may be in my future.

It was "interesting" trying to properly locate the top and bottom holes for the sleeve hitch pin.  I was able to just "pick a spot" on the bottom plate which is where I started. Since the pin needs to go through a piece of tube on the tractor side though, I knew I had to be somewhat accurate with the hole on the far side.  I bounce around a few ideas and was debating about just using the tape measure but since this part had already been welded; it would be slightly harder to do with a tape measure.  What I finally decided on (and which worked) was to dip the tip of the pin (which has a flat tip) in paint and run it up from the bottom against the top plate.  That gave me a fairly accurate point of reference from which I was able to measure and transfer the location from the underside to the topside where I was able to align the bit with it.  I successful in test fitting the plate on the sleeve.  I still have more parts to weld up but I think the hard parts are now complete.

I again am impressed by the ingenuity other folks demonstrated to successfully create jigs and other types of items to successfully hold work in useful ways.

Anyways, it is a fun hobby but don't plan on it being inexpensive for long.  I think many used tools can be good deals though but I am leery of a few used items (plasma cutter being one).

Here is a pic of the in-progress bracket for the sleeve hitch.  I cut some 1/4" angle iron, welded it together and drilled the top and bottom holes for the pin.  You can see the 1 of the brackets I used to clamp the work piece to the drill press.

 Here is the bracket test fitted to the sleeve hitch.  Next I will weld an extension and a vertical piece for bolting the furrow head to.

Here is the end result attached to the mower ;

 This is the test run; not bad.  I don' think the picture is quite as easy to tell how well it worked. 

A very good learning experience.  If I did it again I would extend it another 6" or so.  A minor issues though is that in the up position, it is so close to the ground that it can make contact as you hit bumps.  I would love to convert to a linear actuator mechanism instead of the manual lever/arm; or maybe make an extension to the manual lever to make it easier to use while driving/steering.

Anyways, hope this was entertaining and/or useful to someone.

God Bless,
Scott