What useful tool have you built for your shop?

[Bob Warner]

Hello all, I showed a few of the things I have made in another thread. I am curious what others have made for use in their shop.

It seems that almost everyone builds three basic things:
1. Welding table
2. Welding cart
3. A trailer of some sort

I want to see the OTHER stuff. The stuff you built and use as tools.

In my case I built a treadle hammer which is kinda unusual and my hydraulic press that is also a little unusual compared to what others have in their shops. I have built anodizers for coloring titanium, electro-etch machine for etching my name in the blades and a light box for creating stencils for the logo I etch into the blades, propane and coal forges.
These were built to support my addiction to knifemaking.

I have seen a few ring rollers which I want to build one of these days.

What tools have you built to support your addiction to performing some type of work? What have you built that helps you build something else?

I am bound to need to build some new tools, I just don't know that I need them yet. I need you guys to show me what I am missing.

How about posting some pictures if you have them or at least explain what you built.

Thanks,

Bob

[zapster]

we dont "per say" build anything special for the shop but we will modify most anything if need be..
i needed a 3 jaw chuck that ran dead nuts and had to be able to hold a really thin aluminum tube without slipping and you cant make it egg shaped by squashing it too much to hold it while putting an angle on the I.D.

so i took some 8" tubing and cut sections out of it on the band saw and welded them to a set of "soft jaws" ...
remachined them after welding and heres what i came up with..

Attachment 4722


and the worked just wonderfully!!

heres a home made steady rest for a lathe that did'nt come with one..

Attachment 4723

we'll stop at nothing!!

...zap!

[Bob Warner]

That is exactly what I am talking about. I love this type of thing.

The three jaw chuck is nice.

I knew a guy that mig welded the edges of augars with hard rod to extend their lifespan. I built him a variable speed setup to power his chuck. He mounted the augars in the chuck, set up his mig and turned it on. He had a long bar running the length of the augar and could rest his hand on it. He just followed the edge as the augar slowly turned for him to put a new edge on it.

He made pretty good cash doing this and the machine took a lot of the work out of it.

Makes a heck of a picket twister also.

Great job, looking forward to seeing more things like this.

Bob

[dichdoc]

Here a some pics I had laying around still. A shop chair, a "tool" that makes life alittle easier I find I use it alot at the drill press when making lots of holes. It's a donated Lund boat seat some scrap 2x4 tube and 2x2 that two pieces of unistrut (welded together with 1/2" washers as spacers) slide perfectly in and a nut welded to the 2x2 and a bent 3/8" bolt that threads into a nut and then into the unistrut nut for adjustment. Also a pic of the affore mentioned ring roller that I have posted before. Does a ghetto bending setup count as a tool? It's a Northen pipe Bender with some bolt on mods to bend angle the hard way. Large machine/welding shop in town said they couldn't do it so this was my only hope and it worked very well.

[Bob Warner]

The shop chair is great. I should build one since my left leg is (and always will be) screwed up from a motorcycle accident (Damn Hit & Run drivers). I need to sit a lot more when I work, that is a good idea. I need a seat like that for my lawn mower.

The ring roller looks great, not over complicated like many I have seen but definately capable of doing the trick. What are the rollers made of? Is the drive roller modified in any way to prevent slipping?

The angle bender is escaping me. From the picture I am not sure what I am looking at. Can you elaborate?

I love it when the "Professionals" can't do things and "WE" can figure out how to do them in our home shops. Makes you want to take your stuff back and show it to them.

Great work.

[gnewby]

I don't have the photos handy but I have built a press for in my shop, but the thing I built that I use the most probably is a cherry picker (engine hoist). It sure saves on the old back and I use it often for lifting the front of my riding mower for changing sharpening blades etc. Also used it when lifting my work bench.

It was fun to build, I bought the hydraulic lift for it from Harbor freight and the wheels for it from Northern. I think money wise I had about $75.00 in it. The pipe I used to make it was used 2 3/8 & used 2 7/8 tubing.

I also made a load leveler for it after seeing one at a tool sale, went and bought a couple small pieces of channel and a 24" piece of all thread and put it together it works good. Have used it with the cherry picker to pull and install engines and transmissions. load and unload heavy stuff from the garage into or out of the pickup.

I have also used the t-bone fashon for making a plasma cutter cart and made one for my plasma cutter it works great.

[dichdoc]

The rollers are 1" cold rolled steel they are not treated in anyway to prevent slipping. I wish I would have used bigger stock (stronger) but I was impaitent and the only pillow blocks I could find locally were 1".

The angle bender (that was a bad pic) was needed to bend 1.5x 1x5x 3/16" angle for my snow plow (the piece that rotates back and forth). In the previous pic there is a piece of square tube screwed onto the bender frame for a spacer and the two pieces of square with holes in them that the factory pins slide through. I used a factory die (1" pipe I think) on the jack cut notched the angle with a chop saw put the angle in the unit and pounded a scrap wood 2x6 in opposite the metal space and bent! I'll post some more pics to make it more confusing! IN the 3 tries pic my attempts are from top to bottom the first was without any releif cuts the second they are space too far apart all along the angle and the third and keeper they were about 1" apart just in the middle, I bent it and welded the spaces shut and ground them smooth you can see the piece in place in the new plow set up pic its the piece with white grease on it. Everything black on the plow was new.

[awright]

Bob, is your electro-etcher a basic high current, low voltage transformer with tungsten etching tip in a manual etching pen or something more technologically exotic? I use the manual pen for tool identification, but the result, while effective in identification, looks crappy with lots of spark and burn marks. I also get lots of stick-slip action that makes it hard to control the appearance of the mark. If you are marking the knives you sell, I presume you are getting better looking results than I am. How do you do it?

I have seen ads for an etcher that uses an electrochemical process with a stencil and an electrolyte. Does anyone know what their process is? Anybody have a homebrew version?

Zap, that's a neat looking tube chuck. I've had good luck minimizing tube distortion using a Bison six-jaw lathe chuch to get more uniform clamping force around the tube.

awright

[zapster]

Zap, that's a neat looking tube chuck. I've had good luck minimizing tube distortion using a Bison six-jaw lathe chuch to get more uniform clamping force around the tube.

awright





Yeah we have a few 6 jaws also..

still no good for that job..
i had to turn the jaws pretty much the same size as the rings so it would clamp around the tube nice nice..
turn them too big..only the middles touch..
so whats the point of makin'em?
too small and the outside edges touch (X3)
that wont cut it either..
no marking of the O.D. of anykind allowed...
so it worked out good..

me no scared...

...zap!

[Bob Warner]

You want a homebrew version of the electromechanical version with stencil and electrolyte?

Lets see if I can help with this request.

Go here to see the plans with radio shack part numbers to build the electro-etcher for about $50 if you buy all new stuff.
http://www.warnerknives.com/electro-etcher.htm


Go here to learn how the process works, where to get electrolyte and stencil "Resist" material and instructions on how to build a light box to make your own stencils. This is exposure unit (light box) is a big buck item that costs a fortune to buy. But one I figured out the process I built the box for next to nothing.

http://www.warnerknives.com/stencil_exposure_unit.htm

I don't have a closeup of the mark but here is a knife with my logo (my last name) on the blade. They come out really nice and crisp. Excuse the poor quality photo.



Enjoy,

Bob

[Bob Warner]

gnewby.

Now the angle bender makes sense to me. Thanks for clearing it up.

Bob

[kevey]

I haven't made anything really cool, just useful to me. I made this jig from 2x4 and 10' sticks of conduit to space and center balusters on the top rail for welding railing. I just find the center of my toprail, and align it with the center mark on my jig and clamp everything up and go.

I have the conduit marked for 4 inch and 6 inch intervals...the 6 inch is for a log bed railing I'm trying to build. The 4 inch is for railings that I am planning to build for my patio.

[TubularFab]

Right now the most usefull is the rotary draw bender I built. It uses a hydraulic ram pulling on leaf chain to rotate the spindle. It'll bend up to 2" OD x .125 wall tubing.

[justweldit41]

Thats pretty sharp, I built an hosfeld lookalike and love it. What do you do for return on the the machine do you turn it back by hand, i couldn't tell if it returns back to zero or not. But defiantly some fine designing and quality of workmanship.

justweldit41

[zapster]

i want one!!!

...zap!

[dichdoc]

Panozeng, I'm confused, where do you pound in the 2x6 for fine tuning the fit??? I feel like such a scab! TB

[Bob Warner]

That bender is great. Bet it took a while to get it all figured out. You should have made plans for that thing (if you didn't). I know I would build one if I had the need to bend a lot of pipe. A little to pricy to build just for the "COOL" factor.

Great job, I am impressed.

[awright]

Beautiful tube bender! And nifty idea for the linear/rotary conversion. But where do you get the rotary die? That's the hard part.

awright

[Joeejoee]

Brake built for hyd. shop press with open center to bend 90's.

Joe

[Joe H]

I wish my camera would work right, I've been having troubles downloading for a few weeks...

I didn't build it, but my dad built us a furnace for casting brass, aluminum, etc.. He built it from a Dave Gingery book. It came out very nicely. He doesn't use it much anymore, but he used to make alot of artsy stuff like sundials and weathervanes with it. Lately I've been wanting to dig it out and play with it, still have all the mold forms and a 50gal bucket of sand.

[admswelding]

This is my lifting boom/jib i built out of pipe i have picked up close to 1000lbs. with it but i would not try anything heavier than that.

[Diverbill45]

Bob, ................ I built this, at the end of last summer, with the help of my 12 year old grandson. I've started to teach him to weld, so I let him do most of the welding. I use it to weld pipe and tubing with my wire-feed and TIG setup. My son is an electrician so he did all the wiring and supplied the components. It has a foot control for controlling the revolutions and also has a forward and reverse. I have a total of $70.00 invested. With whats in the control panel and all the other bearings, lathe chuck and other items to put this together, if I were to purchase all these items new, it would come to around $800.00.

It comes in handy when beveling pipe and making oil tanks for a friend of mine that builds choppers.

[Diverbill45]

Here's another little item that REALLY comes in handy. I made it up to hold tubing in place so that both your hands are free.

I build mini-sandrail frames and every so often you need to fit a piece in place and hold it until you're ready to tack it.

It's made out of 2 pieces of angle, 2 pieces of flatbar, a couple of pieces of althread and 2 pieces of flatbar that were cut into an arc. It can be adjusted to any angle you want.

This clamp has been a real time saver.

[Bob Warner]

The chuck setup is very similar to what I built for a guy to weld hard edges on augars. Very nice.

The clamp is a great idea. I may need to build one myself someday.

Great work.

[sc6chuck9]

Hey Bob, thanks very much for putting this in here as I'm semi retired and love to make things, I just have trouble thinking of what to make,,,,,this will help me come up with ideas i think