Hello to everyone. I’d just wanted to relay my experience with my fireball table. I have a few friends that are professional welders/fabricators that came over to help with delivery and set up of my table. We were able to get it in the shop and in its legs in about an hour and set to work on getting it level & flat….that process was very straight forward and took about 5 min. We then wasted about an hour testing its flatness. I say wasted because the table is just….well flat…!!
Experiment time!!
We set out to recreate the box test that Jason did I. His recent video. The five of us built a 24” x 26 1/4” box with a 1/16” tolerance both on my old fab table (1” plate steel) and on the new FB fixture table. We all did our own fixturing and cutting materials. Well….No one passed on the plate table and we all passed on the fixture table. It was truly at that moment that doubt about how much the table and fixtures cost went away and I knew I was going to create some bad ass stuff on this table.
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@PatGreen I’m curious how confident the guys were when they made the frame on the plate steel table. We’re they confident or humble in their skills? What were the reaction when the frames were tested? How warped was the plate steel table?
Jason,
Yeah I think we were all pretty confident that we could do it. The guys all took a long time at the saw to get tight measurements and was focused on set up and tacking. My plate table is level, but does have some movement (highs/lows) in it. I think one thing we did wrong was test the squares before we tried it on the FB table. Because everyone was using tons of clamps to keep it flat. We tested the guy with the most experience square first. We all agreed we had the fixture blocks in the correct spots so there was no arguing the results. His square was “flat” with about a 32nd or warp but within “spec”. However, it was short on one side by a 16th. He was pretty surprised. After I saw his square failed I knew I didn’t have a chance. In full disclosure mine was long on one side by 1/32nd and short by about a 16th and was warped out of spec. I tacked each corner all the way around then finished it off. I was surprised at how I was unable to control the warping as badly as I did.
The guy with the most experience is coming over this week…he wants to do it again on the FB table, but without fixtures to see how he does. As a side note he’s worked in an aerospace shop for 18 years. He can fabricate anything. It will be an interesting test. He said he was going to talk to his managers to see about getting a couple of your tables. He is, as we all were, very impressed.
I’m thinking about buying an eight foot straight edge, to see just how flat we got it. Just curious at this point.
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