Latest Work Completed Mantua, New Jersey
Original Site:
September 2004
E-mail: usav8or@yahoo.com
Aircraft Welding 102:
Makin' the biplane
November 21, 2007 Makin' caps... ...and
they aren't the baseball kind.
I'm ready for the big time. Took a few of my practice welds
over to Paul Musso for him to give me the approval. He said
that they checked out OK. Good enough for me.
Before I could weld up the rudder pedals I wanted to make
a few practice welds on welding a "cap" on the end of a
tube, similar to what I would need to weld on the end of
a horizontal tube that would connect to the rudder cables
on the rudder pedal.
The other
night I cut a few circles out of .100 4130 so that I could
practice this welding "technique." Grabbed a few pieces
of tubing along with the circles I cut and went out to the
garage workshop thinking that I'm gonna have some fun. Screwed
the smallest tip I had into the O/A rig, lit it up and started
welding. The hardest part of the entire session was making
sure that I tack welded the circle in the center of the
tube, and that wasn't even that hard. (I think next time
I'll grind an beveled edge to the circle so that it would
center itself on the end of the tube, almost like a cork.
This "cap" would be a non-structural part and I wanted to
know if I could "clean up" the look of it. You're not suppose
to file/grind the weld bead on a structural part but this
wasn't structural and not much stress would be applied to
it at any time.
I took my question to the biplane forum and got a reply
back from Erich, a commercial jet mechanic. He basically
said that he has filed off any beads that were sticking
out in the air. Kinda figured that but wanted to ask the
group to be sure about it. Now that I know... I won't necessarily
go filing down the welds on non-structural parts, I'll just
keep this in the back of my head just in case. Thank you,
Erich.
With that being said... I'm ready to weld these puppies
up.