How many use a non-commercial 'flat' welding table?

[realdocBBQ]

I’m sure given unlimited funds, most of us would love to have a commercial-grade fixture table. Utterly flat, proper fixturing holes and all the fixtures, blocks and clamps and accessories we could ever want.

Given @Fireball_Jason’s videos showing multiple professional welding shops cannot seem to obtain the specifications in his plans, it seems obvious how important such a thing is (or should be) in running a business producing quality products as a fabricator.

Unfortunately for me, there is little, if any, chance that I will have a setup such as this anytime soon. I’ve worked hard my whole life (at least I think I have) and still am not in any position to even have my own shop, land or place to work, much less something like a high quality fixturing table. Granted, I am not a fabricator, I don’t do this for a living. But I’d still love to be able to do this at the level demonstrated in his videos. I can dream…

I’m just wondering, how many of you here are currently “making do” and just getting by with using either a homemade table that is as reasonably flat and functional as you can get it, or what else do you do?

As for me? I’ll admit, I usually either assemble things on the decidedly uneven concrete floor of my buddy’s shop, or I lay an equally decidedly non-flat piece of 1/4" plate on top of a pair of Harbor Freight sawhorses and do the best I can do. I am aware of the limitations this imposes on me, but in what I’m doing, I’ve never needed the kind of precision demonstrated in Jason’s videos, but I sure wish I COULD achieve things like that. I’d like to see what kind of results I could manage, even if just for my own satisfaction.

Anyone else care to chime in?

[Knick]

The current table I have is 5x6x3/4" I bought it used for $250 8-9 years ago. It came from a large company in my area you may have heard of, called SteelCase.
It was used to cut fabric I think and was made by their maintenance team. The top was Blanchard ground ( don’t ask me why for cutting fabric ) and it has a fairly heavy frame. I put 5/8" holes on a 4" grid and laid it all out by hand. I did not know at the time how to go about getting the holes in accurately, so its far from perfect in that respect and its not perfectly flat. I added some other features like electric on one end and both sides.

I am currently building a new table that will be 5x8x3/4 with 5/8" holes on a 2" grid. I made it so I can hopefully level the top and get it pretty close.
The Holes were put in at a machine shop on a very large mill so the holes should be as close as any.

Send me your Email and I will send you pics of my current set up and the new if you want to see it.
If I were you I would keep a look out on Market place, and local auctions, there is always tables on there. Some good and some are junk. There is a fairly large Fabricator 20 miles from me that everything is going up for auction.

There are deals out there but they wont come looking for you and they take time to run across.

Another thing you might do just for kicks is contact a large Fabricator in your area and see if they have any tables laying around they might want to get rid of.

Good Luck!

[realdocBBQ]

Oh I definitely see a lot on FB Marketplace - maybe not all that great, but quite a few. For me, it’s the money, yes, but also the space. I don’t have a place to put a table. I work out of my buddy’s shop, which is overcrowded and full and I won’t be putting a table in his space. We’re working to clear some of it out, but a table will be very very low on his list of priorities to put in there - like, not on the list.

[realdocBBQ]

Of course, I should clarify - when I say ‘flat’, I’m talking about the normal flat most people think of, just holding a straightedge on the table surface and eyeballing it to call it flat. I think we can all imagine in most of these homemade (i.e., not commercial) tables, there would likely be many areas that weren’t truly flat and might have a 32nd or even a 16th variance, or more.

I had to look up Blanchard grinding, and from what I see, it can achieve a flatness of +/- 0.001 inches or so. Not bad at all. Nothing I’ll ever be able to achieve, of course. My ultimate goal would be to buy some land, build a house and shop, and have enough room to buy my own table, ideally a 4x8 or 5x10 commercial table - the Fireball one looks awesome, of course. I have my doubts I’ll ever achieve that. With 20+ years in medicine and still paying off student loans and making squat for money (I’m in Primary Care, not one of those ‘rich’ specialists ), I just don’t see it being in the cards. Maybe by retirement time, but even that doesn’t look promising - I have too many scruples, unfortunately, and am not willing to sell out. lol

[AfreakanHobbyist]

We need to acknowledge that there are at least three big topics / questions in your post.
First is the title question .. “how many of us…”
Next is what a forum like this will be able to help you a lot with, which is “what hack can i use granted that i’m not going to use a fixturing table?”
But the third is far more nuanced, far bigger picture, and perhaps therefore has far greater reach. And that’s whether we light duty fabricators should ever expect to get / use what’s in truth a quite extreme set of equipment. And then if we do want to make the extreme happen, how to work around to it.

In this social species with division of labour, we can’t have / learn / experience everything. The specialist automotive tuner will have equipment i’ll never get to use. The sushi chef will have a knife i can only dream of. The cult leader will spread his seed more. And the full time high end fabricator will have a full fixturing kit including a massive flat reference plane. I’m not saying i can never ever have one of those sushi knives. But if i want it from outside of my specialist world, i’m going to have to trade some aspect of my life. Maybe i’ll have to be a worse father. Or not breed. Or live in a job i hate over one i like because it pays more. The alchemists would say ‘equivalent exchange’.

This is all to say that, the way to a great fixturing solutoin might be very indirect. Rather than a hack to get as close as possible. It might be spending initial time doing something totally unrelated to fabrication that sets you up to earn more and then in the long term step into a full table setup. It might be investing in your buddy’s shop / business, having it grow as a consequence, and when it moves to bigger premises having your own corner of the shop because you’ve ‘somehow’ ‘magically’ become an integral component of their continued success. It might be becoming a fabricator and then the specialist equipment becomes an integrated component of your world. It might be studying psychopathy and soicial manipulation in order to manipulate a rich widow to marry you. It might be taking on greater risk and forgoing morals to steal from others. Whatever it is, if the frustration is not having the fixturing setup, and you are going to put resources into changing that (time is a resource), don’t forget the very round-about indirect way. And recognise that what resources you do spend into a partial solution won’t be available for the round-about approach any more. (you can’t take a night course in stock trading AND spend those nights drilling holes in a plate that will stand against your buddy’s shop wall most of the time.

If you want a fixturing solution that doesn’t act like a table (taking up large floor space, and i think could be put together yourself, then i still think that my approach proposed here in the topic ’ Could beams be a more generally useful fixturing fundamental?’ is sound. Un-tested. But theoretically sound.

If you’re mostly building small things, a fixture plate is possibly even better than a table.

If you’re mostly building big things there’s a whole parallel approach to fabrication-by-reference-plane, concentrating on measurement and bracing corners mostly. So you could still feed the fireball by buying squares and clamps. Propping the work on spacers. Building around a form. Etc.

Think outside teh box. For instance, if you already have some other form of table / work bench, this could be upgraded and be extreme overkill most of the time but come out as a fab table when needed. And this includes remembering that a fabrication reference doesn’t absolutely have to be made of metal. Especially if not being used much . I’ve built a fabrication bench top from particle board that really truly is accurate and strong. But then, it took a week; two years of taking scraps home from the built-in cupboard job’s dumpster; building a slab flattening rig for a router… Equivalent trade.