The Hands And The Eyes, Part I

Back in August, I was let go from my job. It wasn't a complete surprise but I certainly would have preferred to have been the one to say "This isn't working out" when I had something else lined up. I knew it wasn't a good fit for me and apparently, they thought the same thing. They just beat me to the punch. It is what it is and given the state of the economy, finding another source of income is/was a challenge (to say the least). Fortunately, my Dad has a Machine Shop that he runs out of a large building on his property and he had just been awarded a fairly sizable contract and as such, he needed some help. He was willing to pay me a fair wage if I were willing to help him out.

Of course, I agreed. I needed the money and the idea of learning something new was very attractive. I.T. hasn't exactly been very good to me over the last couple of years and frankly, the idea of completely changing careers was rather appealing. And I love working with my hands. There is something very cool about taking a pile of raw materials and turning it into a finished product (e.g. Look what I did!)

I have never welded anything before, nor have I used a Lathe or a Milling Machine. I have used a band saw, a drill press, and a belt sander. I also pride myself on my deductive reasoning so I tend to be able to figure out things fairly well on my own.

The contract that my Dad had was to build 30 steel storage crates for aircraft engines. These would be built primarily from 2" steel tubing and needed to support these engines indefinitely, so they needed to be solid and sturdy. We built a prototype, fitted it to an engine the customer had lent us. After a few design tweaks, we checked the fit again and then built a jig. We returned the engine and got to work.

I'm a pretty organized person and after finalizing the design of this crate, it was obvious that we should approach this project from an assembly line perspective. We needed the pieces to build the crate so it seemed logical that if we already had all of the pieces ready to go, the crates themselves would be easy to crank out. This meant we (and by "we", I mean "I/me") would have to cut a LOT of pieces of steel to various lengths. I figured out how many pieces each crate required and what lengths they needed to be. According to my math, each crate required 34 pieces and there were 30 crates so that's over 1,000 pieces of metal that needed to be cut and machined.

Once those were all done (it took about a week and a half), we started building them. Due to space limitations, we decided to deliver these in batches of 10. By the time we started on the second batch, I was doing all the fabrication and the tack welding. All my Dad was doing was the finish welding. The system worked pretty well and we actually delivered all of them well before the date we were supposed to.

I'm pretty proud of myself. My organizational skills proved invaluable and I learned how to weld (and it turns out that I'm pretty damn good at it too).

One welding hood. The best investment I've ever made in improving my physical appearance.

The band saw. This thing put in some SERIOUS hours and chewed through over 1400 feet of steel.

The welder.

This is the loaner engine and the build-up cart we used as the basis for our crate. The engine weighs about 700 lbs.

The jig we built for fitting each crate. It's a lot easier to use this than to swing around a 700 lb. engine with every crate to make sure it fits.

The end of the crate; framed up, squared, clamped, and ready to weld.

Another shot of the clamped up crate.

½ of the first batch. Each completed crate weighs about 175 lbs.

Close up of a finished crate.

Another close up.

The belt sander got me. Ouch!

The finished crates after they'd been delivered and they painted them.

Another one of the painted crates.

One more of the paint job.

All in all, I think they turned out pretty damn awesome (as far as a boring piece of steel designed to hold an obsolete engine can be "awesome"). It did lead me to another, personal project which did turn out awesome as well. I will post that later.