lastcowboy32

Kozzy, I do quite a bit of gas welding, and it IS really tempting to drop a piece in a bucket or something just to get on with with whatever work I'm doing. I've had pieces be too hot to touch for what seems like eternity...especially when it's a piece of farm equipment, and you have stuff to do. But I don't; because I don't want to make my welds as fragile as glass :-) Arkie, You're correct about the hand drill. I was using a high quality Milwaukee drill with variable speed. I tried varying the speed, pressure and angle of attack (a little..since my goal was to be perpendicular) on that one hole with no success. In all of the other three holes that I made, I never had any problems. The metal just shaved smoothly as I would expect.

I thought about that. I actually did four holes. Two on the other side of the assembly and two on this side. I did the two on the other side first. They were both smooth. The "chippy" hole was the third one. The countersink started acting weird. It was chattering, throwing chips, etc. I pulled it out and tried the fourth hole. No problem, nice and smooth. I finished the fourth hole and went back to the third one. (What I'm calling the "third" and "fourth" hole here in this reply are the ones that I've been talking about. They are both in the same piece of patched on metal.) I went back to the third hole, and the countersink chattered and chugged, throwing chips all of the way to the end of the process. Just for another sanity check, I put it back into the fourth hole. It was still smooth and throwing filings. I'm thinking that the countersink is still OK.

I understand about the picture. I can't get that right now. What I perhaps didn't explain completely is that both holes that I was countersinking were in the same piece of metal. The whole piece of metal had been welded on as a patch to thicken a plate where two conical fasteners are seated. The patch plate is a rectangle about 1-1/2" wide and 4" long. It's about 1/8" thick. The base metal underneath the patch platet that it's welded to is also about 1/8" thick. There are two 1/2" diameter holes in this patch plate. One near each end of it. In the same piece of metal (this patch plate), one hole drills/countersinks like cast iron. The drill or countersink removes chips. The resulting countersink taper required filing and sanding so smooth. The other hole drills/countersinks like steel. The drill or countersink removes shavings. The resulting countersink taper was smooth and shiny. Both holes are in the same piece of metal. The only thing that I can think of is that something during the process of cutting or welding that piece of metal accidentally heat treated one end of it.

I was working on an old piece of farm equipment last night. The piece that I was working on was a plate welded on to patch some thinning metal. The particular piece of machinery is about forty years old. I've had it for two; so I have no idea when this plate was added. I was using a large conical countersink to add a taper to two bolt holes in the same plate. Explanation: This particular application uses conical bolts and nuts, similar to lug nuts. Anyway, I was countersinking both holes in the same plate. In one hole, the countersink brought out thin pieces of shavings, similar to short drill filings that you would expect in steel. When I removed the countersink, the taper was smooth and shiny. In the other hole, the countersink chattered, no matter what I did. Instead of shavings, it brought up little chips, similar to what I would expect when drilling cast iron. The final taper was not very smooth, it had little tiny ridges all around it that required filing to smooth. I'm assuming that this patch plate started as steel. Could the person that welded it on have done something to one end of it that would essentially revert that section back to cast iron-like properties? Is there a way for me to reverse this with my oxy-acetylene or oxy-propane torch? Thanks? Or perhaps it was done before it was even welded? Maybe they used a torch to cut the piece for the patch and did the damage then?

What you call "points", I call "sections". That is a very cool dinosaur, but I shudder to think of how long I would have to save sections for this, as I might change ten or so per year. :-) The mention of spring teeth, though is useful; as I have a rake and tedder that both use spring steel teeth. The tedder has spring teeth with a spring section sandwiched between two teeth that grab the hay. I often scrap them out when only one tooth is gone; since they don't grab the hay as well. That would still leave the central spring and the tooth itself. Using them for something might make me feel better about the 12 bucks that I pay for replacements.

I can sympathize with the excess of "scrap" beer cans. We cleaned out a neighbor's old dairy barn once. It was the typical construction with main carrier beams over the cows' heads that carried a skeleton of rafter beams that spanned the barn width. What that meant was that there was an approximately 1' by 1' cubby hole on top of the carrier beams between the rafters. Every one of those cubby holes was stuffed with beer cans. We found beer bottles and bottle tops stuffed into the walls (these old barns typically had hollow walls, planked on the inside, sided on the outside with an air gap for "insulation") wherever there was a gap in the wall planks. One source of "play metal" has come to mind from these suggestions, though. I have a haybine, and I regularly change guards on it. The scrap guards would be handy little nuggets of "play steel", I would think? For the uninitiated, this is what I mean by a "guard". It protects the knife sections on a sickle bar mower. Each one is about the size of a large man's hand.

OK... it's hard to work with. Noted. He and/or I should play around with easier types of iron/steel first. Noted. Hand forged frying pans? Sounds fun...with the limitations above noted. The other options for this scrap that are non-forged would involve cutting, bending and welding...which also are non-trivial. Full disclosure, I've shunned buying a stick welder, why? Because I want to do my welding with oxy-acetylene for a couple of reasons: -OA makes its own shielding gas. -OA welding consists of using a torch with one hand and holding filler in the other; which is much like TIG...which...to me...is the ultimate welder that I want to buy some day (with a plasma cutter, since we're in fantasy land) -OA welding can, with proper technique and fluxes (in my understanding) weld more combinations of alloys and thicknesses than, say, stick or MIG But the main, super secret, motivation is that I want to learn techniques that would allow me to make something(s) cool, aesthetically pleasing and/or useful from this stainless that I have. As for old farm implements: Yup, that kind of stuff, I have around as well. I've also read that one should, at the beginning, work with some new pieces that are known alloys to reduce the number of variables with learning your technique...for instance...if you try a quenching technique for alloy A on a piece of scrap that is actually alloy B... it doesn't work...you then fuss with your quenching technique...but really you're off in the weeds; because you don't know the alloy.

Hi, New guy. Background: Grew up on a dairy farm. Became an electrical engineer. Got into woodworking. Got back into farming. Got myself a welder and a Oxy-Acetylene torch setup to fix farm equipment (and, I'll admit... "just because") We have the remnants of an old pipeline milking system on our farm: About 130 feet of 2" diameter stainless pipe and an old, double-walled stainless steel 375 gallon milk cooling bulk tank (which is too old to get parts for anymore). I've thought about scrapping them, but scrap is bringing next to nada at the moment. I never really thought much about doing anything else, except turning the bulk tank into a BBQ setup (which I've seen others do). Then, our youngest daughter starts dating a young man. He comes up to help us do hay a couple of times, and he starts showing me pictures of his attempts at forging with minimal tooling. The kid has some drive and interest, but not much material to work with. So I start thinking about all of the stainless that we have laying around. Is that a resource to play with to try some forging experiments? What would be some good ideas to try to create from stainless?