Today, drilling and cutting of steel pieces continues with the 9 pieces which tie the front and back beams together.. These are about 2.6m long 50mm square tubes with two holes drilled at each end and the tops of the boxes sliced off to exposed the drilled holes.
Beam Tie Drilled and sliced
To make it easier to make the 9 pieces a jig is made to allow the same actions to be repeated over and over again with consistent results.
Today, in the workshop, lots of pieces were drilled, like for example, the 10mm thick plates with 13mm holes in the 4 corners (7 of these, one for each leg).
Steel-plates-drilling
The work continued today in preparing all the pieces of steel work, cutting some to the correct sizes, some being drilled with bolt holes and screw holes.
There are hundreds of pieces, some 3mm thick, all the way up to 10mm thick plates, all needing some work on them.
It is a matter of being accurate and taking it slowly but surely to get all the pieces ready for assembly later on.
Today, now that the steel has all arrived, all cross checked against original order list, the major task of preparing the pieces and practicing the various welds and drilling tasks is being done.
We took one of spare pieces of hollow tube (the 160mm by 80mm size) and a piece of a 10mm plate and welded it on the bottom end of the leg, and then sliced away a small section through the weld to inspect how well (or badly) it went, as you can see in the picture below, it looks very good.
Test-weld-of-leg-plate-join-2
Test-weld-of-leg-plate-join-Weld-Detail-1
Also, the plasma cutter seems to cut the 10mm thick plate fairly easily so this means we can cut the stock size plates to the more desired sizes to fit more neatly on the framework. It is looking all good so far!