In reference to my early post, about a HF crane that I wanted to install, and having a 12x13", 5/8" thick plate.
I have procured another, similar size plate. If I weld them together, I will get an approximately 13x24" plate, which I feel will be more or less enough for the crane. I would place it to the right rear end of the truck bed, and will use through bolts and angle for backing underneath.
The question is how to weld them together, using stick welding. They probably need to be beveled. I have two ways of doing it: 1) with a Bridgeport mill and a 45 degree end mill, or with a Hypertherm powermax and a special gouging consumable.
My own thinking is that the Bridgeport approach is more straightforward and will give me a much more uniform bevel.
Any other ideas? How deep should I bevel? Would I need a root pass with 6011, to weld over with 7018? This will be a relatively low stress connection, just holding a HF crane, but I feel like doing it more thoroughly leaves me with a little more room for error.
I doubt you would NEED a root pass with 6011, but it'll save you the time you would spend bevelling the edges.
Butt them together, crank up the amps, and go to town on it with the
6011, and you should be able to bounce your bead off a backup plate on the backside of the weld. If you want a really good groove, dip the 6011 in water prior to use.
Then have at with the 7018.
If you want to do it so it's pretty, that's another thing entirely. :-)
Got a torch? Just use the torch to bevel the plates, leaving about
1/16" of the original vertical edge. Clamp a piece of angle iron down to act as a guide for the torch. This is common in the field. The other way is to find a big welding shop with a table torch that will cut bevels. I've done many a plate with a table mounted track cutting torch and when set up right it will do a fine job
Since it's possible (and even easy in this case), I'd buttweld from both sides. The advantage there is that such bending you get when you weld one side will somewhat self- correct when you weld the other. It will bend toward the weld a bit even if you clamp the crap out of it.
For you application, I'd probably do a 3/8" bevel with the torch on one plate, space the plates about 1/8" apart, burn a hot pass of 6011 down the middle from the beveled side.Flip it over, use 7018 on the back side, finish up with a 7018 pass on the beveled side. If you weren't fussy, just skip the bevel and open the gap up a bit.
The weld will warp, it will be the devil to straighten it out. S> In reference to my early post, about a HF crane that I wanted to
I don't know any of the details and even if I did I could not do the math but somehow my sense of proportion does not correlate a 24"X13"X5/8" steel plate, a HF crane, a light truck bed, and low stress. I would think that if you need that kind of reinforcing plate it certainly should be bolted to the frame of the truck. A long lever like a crane can put a lot of stress on the attachment and truck beds are not very strong. Certainly not as strong as a
On Fri, 09 Nov 2007 19:11:39 -0600, with neither quill nor qualm, Ignoramus12236 quickly quoth:
I agree with your "less enough for the crane" theory rather than "more than enough." As I said, I'd go with C-channel across the two legs of frame, with another going forward from the rear up the right leg. The stresses are too great for a truck bed to handle. I'll bet that a 500 lb load at half extension of the crane would bend the bed bottom along the 24" direction. Additionally, c-channel distributes the weight to the frame instead of concentrating it in the corner of the bed box as in your scheme. Do think about it.
Now is the time you should be preparing your Neander skills, Ig. Learn to file the bevels manually. You can use it later in learning scraping and filing of ways. Oops, that's not "easiest", is it? ;)
-- Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization. -- Charles Lindbergh
I have a grinder, but I thought that I had to remove quote a lot of material (maybe 5mm on each side) and it is not exactly quick to do with a grinder.
A welder friend of mine tells me of the guys in the yard he used to work in. Anyone pooched a weld, they would blow it out with a small 6011 rod, rather than showing signs of a screwup, by way of a grinder throwing sparks. Said you could always tell the FNG, as there would be a cloud of sparks. Not that the old guys didn't screw up, they just had less conspicuous ways of fixing it. Beat the heck out of hauling an extension cord up a bunch of scaffolding, too.
The aft crossbar for my crane is 1-1/4" tubing with 1" bar inside and the forward one is 1/2" X 2-1/2" hot-rolled bar stock, both with tabs that go under the Ranger's bed bolts. The crane base attaches to two pieces of 1/4" thick by 2" angle iron running fore and aft between the cross beams. It all comes apart easily so I can reinstall the bed liner and takes little storage space.
Only the 1/2" x 2-1/2" crossbar deflects significantly with a 700 Lb load, which has enough leverage to compress the springs as much as
1000 Lbs in the bed. The crossbar hasn't taken a permanent set yet, though.
I use an old Dillon 5000 Lb force gauge to doublecheck this amateur homebrew engineering.
Before committing to any welding, make sure the jack will clear the wall of the bed as the crane swing around while you are busy with the load.
Id seperate them about 1/8-3/16 of an inch, clamp them down and then hit it with 6010 or 6011. for a root pass, Run Hot!, then weld with
7018
But then..Im not a welder. Simply a lowly Dauber.
Gunner
Political Correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.
Probably so, but also probably not that important.
You could flame cut the bevel, or plasma cut it. Or grind it. It would take a lot of grinding but with a larger grinder with one of the coarse stone cup-style grinding wheels you could do in in only a few minutes.
I'd probably just flame cut it and then clean it up with a grinder.
Use whatever is the easiest for you. It doesn't make much difference what you use.
It's common to do root and hot passes with 6010 and do the cover passes with 7018. But you can do it all with 7018 or all with 6011. There's more danger of the 7018 flux getting trapped in the weld which is why it's common to use 6010 on all but the cover pass. The 7018 flux can be a bitch to get out. Be sure to do a good job of cleaning flux out between passes.
The common way to bevel that is with a 30 deg angle. 45 deg would work but it will just mean you have to make more passes to fill it up and you will get more warping from the extra passes. Leave about 1/8" of land (flat edge that you don't bevel). Space the plates about 1/8" apart (or a bit less). This is what you would do if you welded it all from one side.
But when you do that, the last passes of the weld will cause the ends of the plate to warp up. They could be 1" off the ground on either side when you are done. If you have done enough of this, you can tack the plates with the edges down so it will warp into a near straight position. But without practice, the odds of you making that work well are slim.
What might work better for you, is to weld from both sides. Double-bevel the plate leaving about a 1/8" land in the middle and space the plates with a 3/32" gap. Run a root pass, then alternate sides with each filer pass. That should minimize the amount of warping that happens because each pass will offset the warping of the previous pass. I'd weld all but the cover passes with the 6011 and use 7018 for the cover passes.
Clamp your plates to something strong as you weld each pass to minimize warping.
Somebody seemed to suggest welding without a bevel. You could probably do that. You can't melt through 5/8" plate with 1/8" rod (at least I've never seen it done), but you could just space them far enough apart (1/4"?) to get the rod in the gap and then fill the gap. You would need to use a backing plate on one side then just fill up the gap.
The reason this is not normally done is because there will be a huge amount of flux trapped in that little gap and you won't be able to get down into the gap to clean out the flux. You end up trapping flux in your weld which just makes it weak. That might not be a big issue for your application but if you want to do it right, put a bevel on it.
My first choice would be a torch, plasma would be a fairly distant second choice. If you bevel both sides then it's not out of reasonable reach of a grinder, it'd be pretty small bevels then.
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