If you’re looking to seriously take your shop to the next level, a plasma table is going to be a damn good way to do so. This is the Eastwood Elite 4 x 4 CNC Plasma Table with CNC 60 Amp Plasma Cutter and it’s what we’re going to be […]
Metalwork & Fabrication
How to Make a Pattern of Complex Shapes
When restoring or customizing a vehicle it can be difficult to make a patter of a complex or compound shape on the car with simple hand tools. Most vehicles have compound curves that have shape in all directions and can dip and dive and change shape drastically over a short […]
The Best Way to Measure Surfaces for True Flatness
Automobiles have a lot of areas that require extremely tight or true tolerances and checking for true flatness is necessary for things like cylinder heads, engine blocks, intake decks, and bearing surfaces. Using your eyeball or an old carpenters level isn’t the best choice if you want a good reading. […]
The Top 3 Ways to Treat Freshly Blasted Metal
It’s no secret that media blasting is one of the best ways to clean metal and get it perfectly clean. Media blasting propels an abrasive media at the surface at a high velocity to knock coatings and corrosion off of the metal. This means that what’s left is virgin clean […]
Can You MIG Weld Stainless Steel?
We often get asked if metals other than mild steel can be welded with a MIG welder. The most common is Aluminum or Stainless Steel and if it can be welded by a MIG welder. Below we give some information about welding stainless steel with a MIG.
Get Comfortable and Step Up Your TIG Game
Step up your TIG game and take your machine to the next level, enabling you to perform stronger and better looking welds. Regardless of the capabilities of the machine that you have, if you are looking to lay down the same great looking welds over and over, you have to be comfortable in your welding position. It’s good practice to take your time to get into a comfortable position and take a dry run before you start an arc. This will tell you whether your position will enable you to complete your weld from end to end without stopping and starting.
How to Tighten up a Weld Seam on a Patch Panel.
No one’s perfect, but we can do our best to strive to get the closest we can get to perfection every day. These ideals are the same whether you’re a cook, a machinist, a landscaper, or a guy in his garage building an old car or motorcycle. One big lesson I’ve learned over the past few years has been to slow down and take the time to make sure that parts fit together as nice as possible before welding. Just blindly rough cutting a piece and trying to make it fit another piece is going to end with an uneven weld seam and won’t end well!
Complex Rust Patch Panel Made Easy
At times rust repair can be ultra simple; cut the old rust out, cut a square of fresh metal and weld it in. But those repairs aren’t usually as frequent as we’d like. Rust seems to like to creep into a curved area or into a body line that takes more care to repair. I recently decided to tackle a large rusty area of the rear portion of the floor on Project Pile House.
How to Channel A Ford Model A
Back in the late 1940’s-1960’s it was pretty easy to distinguish if a hot rod in a magazine was built on the east coast or on the west. One of the big differences is how the profile and stance of the car differed. An “east coast hot rod” was easily identifiable by its low ride height and body channeled pretty hard over the chassis without chopping or lowering the roof. It seems as the years went on guys were channeling and lowering their cars more and more until there was almost no ground clearance and no headroom from the raised floor.