Tonight I solidified the fact that MIG is worth doing.
I created a bunch of junk sculptural items, plus several welds of which I am rightly proud.
This was a basic welding course held by Sydney TAFE, Ultimo. I’d highly recommend it.
I last had my own welding gear decades ago, so it’s been a nice reintroduction for me. I used to have oxy-acetylene equipment, and this has all been electric – Stick, MIG, and TIG.
This week I took the basic parts that I made last week, and got them to fit the stove top.
Then a few bits of MIG welding, followed by some more grinding and filing to make everything look like I knew what I was doing.
The inevitable rust conversion, and spray painting with some high temperature engine enamel.
In the end, I am very happy with the result.
No more uneven cooking surface, no more toppling frypans or little saucepans.
Office Battlebot #2
Since the previous version didn’t stack up, I move on to version 2.
This time I went for solid concrete. An improvement in structural strength, but a definite minus for the weight. There’s no way this version would move using the helicopter motors.
Office Challenge
My coworkers thought it would be fun to build and compete with some indoor battlebots.
What you see in the next few videos are the failures and successes in equal measure.
Like Goldilocks said – some are too delicate, some are too heavy, and some are just too pretty. Come along for the ride !
I have spent the last year or two being aggravated on a daily basis by the stupid design of my stove top burner.
It has only 4 support spots, whereas a professional commercial gas burner has 8.
So obviously, I need to fix this.
Today I took the first step – to come up with a solution, buy the steel bits required, and fashion a few rudimentary bits ready for fabrication.
I’ll fuse them all together next Monday at my TAFE welding course.
Then “goodbye to the toppling frypans”, and no longer having to rescue raw eggs from the floor… or for that matter, boiling butter from the little saucepan that refuses to sit on the 4 fashionable but badly designed supports.
My tenon saw started to leave dirty marks on timber.
Time to clean things up.
It still cuts just fine, so the teeth don’t need sharpening.
All I did was remove the rust and sand it a bit.
But now it’s not an eyesore, and I can cut cleanly with confidence again.
I guess technically this is a Veneer Saw, since it has the extra teeth on the top leading edge (so you can start a cut in the middle of the sheet).
But I’ve always called it my tenon saw.
Office Battlebot #1
This weekend, I created a prototype battle-bot, and dismantled a RC helicopter for the motors and parts. As it turns out, building a battle-bot out of cement mortar/render just isn’t exactly functional from the defence perspective.
Office Challenge
My coworkers thought it would be fun to build and compete with some indoor battle-bots. What you see in the next few videos are the failures and successes in equal measure. Like Goldilocks said – some are too delicate, some are too heavy, and some are just too pretty. Come along for the ride !
These old pliers have been favourites for decades, but time has added rust, and nothing quite lines up any more.
I tackle the surface finishes, grind the jaws and bring these delightful little pliers back to life.
I decided to leave them with a sparkling metal finish rather than repaint the handles.
This week, I restored a set of vintage vernier calipers, made in Spain around 50 years ago.
These ones read metric and inches, and can measure outer and inner sizes as well as depth.
I’ve had these for decades, and they accumulated a lot of rust and gunk.
The movement had become stiff and uneven.
So I cleaned them, derusted them, filed and polished them back to new condition.
This week, I restored some very old woodworking clamps that belonged to my grandfather.
They were rusty and beat up.
So I cleaned, straightened, derusted, painted, and polished them.
I launched a YouTube channel : Weekend Workshop
Of course (as per usual), I had thought about doing it for some years, then spent months researching and thinking, then one day (not as per usual) I just thought “do it”.
I must have simply run out of excuses – run out of energy thinking about what could go wrong, run out of hearing the same voice in my head saying that it would be a waste of time and energy.
So I did it.
I’m not by nature a publisher. I’m more of a consumer. But I realised that I do have some stories to share. And maybe some help to offer other people. I plan to start simple. To explore and learn the tools and techniques of the YouTube world. To put stuff online without worrying what the end goal is, or what the end result will be.
The idea is simple – to record what I do on the weekends.
A couple of years ago, my brother Jeff challenged me to buy a cheap old motorcycle and build something for the Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride. So I did it. And it turned out to be a lot of work (and a lot of fun) and involved finding a workshop space. And spending every weekend working there, to get the motorbike running and registered with 2 days to spare!
Of course I didn’t take video of the whole custom-motorcycle journey, but I did take lots of photos, and I’ll share them here at some stage.
But at the end of that project, I found myself at a loose end – I had plenty of free weekends, I had a workshop, and I had stories to tell.
Welcome to the Weekend Workshop.
Davo's Weekend Workshop 