I just got back all of the parts that we sent out to some local fab shops and I wanted to give you guys, the forum users, an exclusive peak at the work and a small dive into why this challenge is more difficult than it appears.
Give the plans a try for yourself and see if you can make this part!
Jason, you’re going to be guilty of raising the standards of the fab industry. Good for you! This seems like an excellent exercise to demonstrate the value of your fixture tables.
Morning caffeine hadn’t sunk in yet, so as I was looking at the new print & noting the efforts made to address so many of the critiques of the first test prints, I started scratching my head wondering about the item quantities… Then I noticed QTY: 2, doh!
@Arcwarrior Try it without the fixture table system. Document the fabrication we like to see the outcome. You’ll have a better understanding of your true skill set.
Jason: The first two Cut specifications in the drawing tell you to cut 45 degree miters on both sides of tubes… All the callouts I’ve ever seen in the production and test world, the spec would be something close to “Miter ends at 45 degrees, per top view”.
I had formal education as a technologist in welding and had some expierence at work in past. The statement about skill vs expirience: I belive that in THIS case the shop worker’s expirience is what actually had hindered them.
it’s very unusually tight tolerances fo a one-off item.
they got used to the fact that clients overestimate the requred precision but don’t complain. That’s what happens alot even in mass production.
expirience may cause overconfidence. A sloppy work in measurement and perparation.
I can’t explain fail of the aluminum frame. It actually looks like by accident they took wrong pipe size after calculating how to cut it for a correct size, and they had only limiters from inside of frame, so that was overlooked. They never checked their work.
The only thing that can compare with these tables are table that use dovetail fixtures, but that’s usually reserved for far more precise stuff.
PS. Sorry for my English or possible confusion in terms. ESL
You’d be surprised. If somene got used to one phrasing, they may get confused if they see something else and assume that author had meant something different.
But they must ask about it, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Russians joke that tchnologist version of Murphy’s law is “If you give a task and don’t get questions in return, then the task requirments were misunderstood”.
I have been watching all the feeds on the worth of the fixture table. I have a question to all the naysayers. Why wood you NOT want to use a simple tool that is available to the industry that wood make a product better no matter what the set parameters by the customer are?
I can appreciate that , however , there are several options available to fit your budget
I actually went to the fireball tool web store and created a list of all that I wood need to start using this system and it was under 2000.00$. As a business owner , starting out or established, 2’k capital expenditure is/ should be very attainable and very easy to amortize over even 12 months wood be 160 $ a month ….40$ a week …. 8$ a day … there is no reason why this should stop any professional to NOT. use this system . It has all pros an NO cons. Frankly if you can’t absorb 8 $ a day in your operation you should change careers.
You should probably include at least a few hundred dollars to buy fixtures and stops, otherwise the table isn’t doing much but give you a solid surface to clamp things to.