May 2010 – Page 2 – Run Morgan Run

May 13, 2010

Coffee With a Friend

I have been thinking more and more about things that make me happy and why I don’t spend enough time doing them. I have come to the conclusion that there is definitely a creative side of my brain that is not being flexed enough and I must do and intend to do more about that. When I started this blog, I noticed that as I filled the virtual pages, I felt better about things in general. There was no specific thing I felt better about and I don’t know if the family noticed, but it was very obvious to me the I had a smile on my face a bit more often. The act of writing was helping me express whatever creative stuff was trying to ooze from the right side of my brain and I feel better on the days that I do write.

The welding class that I just finished had the save affect on me. Every Saturday I had that creative outlet that allowed me to relax, clear my mind of work related issues and just have fun creating. You may think that welding is not creative but you would be wrong. From afar i looks like the welder is just melting two pieces of metal together, but it is more than that. In order to be a good welder you need to know your equipment very well. Some welders describe it as being one with your machine, almost a zen like experience. It reminds me of that movie “Breaking Away” where the father of the bike racer explains that he had this set of tool for cutting rock (he worked in a quarry cutting limestone) that allowed him to cut the stone as if it were butter. He knew his tools so well that he could perform at his peak every day, cutting through stone almost effortlessly. That is how I feel when I am creating something. I am living in the moment with a smile on my face truly enjoying what I am creating.

The reason I scheduled my coffee meeting this morning was to pick the brain and exchange ideas with my friend Bob. I referenced Bob and his photography career in my post Party Like It’s 1979 from earlier this year. I have always enjoyed Bob’s work and I actually got more interested in photography after working with him on the “LION” our high school newspaper. I wanted to exchange a few ideas with him and see if I was going down the right path with some things I am thinking about.

Bob had some great ideas and our conversation quickly turned to our kids, careers and even a few possible business ideas. We both agreed that this was a productive meeting and that we should continue our dialog over the next few months to see what happens. I can’t wait to see what he has in mind.

May 11, 2010

Way Up In The Bleachers

Matt and I went to the Cubs game tonight and sat as far away from the field as you can get while still being in the ballpark. Only the rooftop seats on the buildings outside the park are farther away. Matt had purchased the tickets from a youth group who was raising money so even though the tickets were almost double face value, it was for a very good cause. We were way up in section 511 in the very last row against the screen that keeps you from falling out of the stadium. Matt kept apologizing for having bad seats (he is used to our Sox tickets right behind home plate), but I told him it was fine and I was just happy to be there with him. Any day out with my son, especially at a ball game is a good day. Unfortunately we had to deal with two things while we were there, cold weather and the sucky Cubs.

One of the two we could do something about, so after 6 innings of pain (it was pretty cold), we decided to head to Oak Park to watch the Blackhawks game at one of my favorite places, Poor Phil’s. We took the long way and drove past our old house on Grove then arrived at the pub just after the end of the first period. We hung out for the second period and enjoyed a nice dinner, some exciting goals and some good conversation. It was actually a pretty mellow crowd for such a pivotal game for the hawks, but that is how I remember Phil’s even 20 years ago when I lived there (in Oak Park not in the bar).

We headed home after the end of the second period and were able to catch the end of the third by the time we got home. The Hawks won 5-1 and moved on to the Western conference finals against San Jose while the Sox also won against the Twins at Target field. And the Cubs, well they lost again.

We were home by 11 so there was still time to watch the episode of LOST we recorded. What the heck? It sure seems like they are trying to cram way too much explanation into these episodes. As must as I hate to wait a week for a new one, I think I would prefer if they took a little more time to flesh out all that loose ends that they are trying to wrap up. I wonder if the rumors are true that the writers were still writing the final episodes a few weeks into the new seasons. A story line this complex has a lot of baggage from the first 5 seasons that all weigh heavily on how they are going to explain all this. I don’t think I like the way it is going.

May 8, 2010

Welding Class Final

It is always sad when you come to the end of something, whether it be a vacation, a job, a relationship or in this case, a class that I really enjoyed. Over the past 16 weeks, I have commented on many of my experiences in the class. This unfortunately is my last one for this class. I plan on taking an advanced welding class, but I am not able to do so until fall as there are no Saturday classes offered during the summer.

I left the house at 7 am, a little earlier than usual. I wanted to stop and pickup some doughnut holes for the class to enjoy before the test. Little did i know three other people had almost the same idea. When I arrived , there were three dozen doughnuts on the work table to which I added my box of doughnut holes. Lots of sugar to keep us going today. A few of us had also agreed to wear orange tee shirts on this final day as kind of a homage to our instructor Ted. Ted has worn an orange tee shirt to class every Saturday for the past 16 weeks and today was no exception. Unfortunately only one other guy besides me, remembered to wear the orange tee. Regardless, Ted got a kick out of it, which was the intent.

As I mentioned last week, I had two more TIG labs to complete and I was intent on getting both of them done today no matter what. We all signed in and received a quick run down of what today would look like: Two hours in the lab, one hour of review and one hour to take the final. We exited the class room and made a dash for the lab. I say dash because everyone knew they only had two hours to complete whatever labs they had left and there were only so many booths setup for each of the four welding processes. There were only six booths setup for TIG which is what I was concentrating on finishing today and by the time I got out there four of them were already taken. The only two left were booth three which is the messed up one I worked with last week, and booth two which had no firebrick on the bench and a fairly new machine. The firebrick is usually to the side of the metal grate welding surface so that you can set your pliers, goggles filler rod etc. The brick does not conduct electricity so it is safe to set all your ‘stuff’ that you are not directly using during the weld.

I decided to use booth two so I went into booth three and grabbed half a dozen bricks to at least fill half the bench surface. That way I was able to spread out my equipment and work comfortably in the booth. I assembled my TIG torch, turned on the Argon gas flow, turned on the welding machine, checked all the settings and hit the foot pedal to test the gas flow. All system go. Off to the dreaded sand blaster.

Luckily I only had to clean four or five pieces of steel for these two exercises so I would only waste maybe 30 minutes on the cleaning process. The blasting booth was not any better this week and actually it seemed a little worse than usual. I had to keep pumping the gun trigger to get any noticeable sand flow to come out of the nozzle. I decided to only do one edge of each of the two steel pieces that would be used for the butt joint. Since only about 1/2 inch down the length of each piece would be touched by the arc, that is all I really needed to clean. I only did two pieces to start as I was anxious to get to the actual welding.

Back in the booth, I arranged the two pieces of steel on the metal welding surface, about an eighth of an inch apart with one inch of each piece hanging over the table edge. I do the overhang so that I can tack the end together with a quick weld. I then flip the two pieces around and tack the other end. If I did not do this, the two pieces would move closer together as the metal heated up during the weld.

With both ends tacked and cooled enough to hold the pieces steady, I checked my helmet settings, grabbed a filler rod and started the but joint weld. I was immediately in the grove making small concentric circles as I added filler to the weld. The soft blue arc and the gentle buzz of the torch was very soothing and as always helped me concentrate on the task at hand. Once I start doing this at home, I can’t wait to add some classical music or maybe some Stones to the mix. Zen indeed.

I completed the butt joint with almost 100% penetration across the length of the gap. Not perfect but good enough to turn in with limited time. I quickly walked back to the blasting booth and did three more pieces of steel. I wanted to try the butt one more time to see if I got better results and I still need to do some straight beads with filler on the surface. Ten minutes later the blasting was done and I was back in the booth. I tried the butt joint one more with the same results so I set those two aside to clean up later and jumped on the filler task.

The filler task went very well as I have a pretty steady hand and the only trick is to feed the filler rod into the heat but not into the arc so that it melts in as evenly as possible. The goal is to have a nice straight bead with even height across the whole length of the plate. I ran six rows of beads with filler and was satisfied with the results, so I took that plate and the original butt joint task over to the quenching tank (we need to cool the metal in water in order to work with it without gloves), dried them off with the air hose and polished them up with the grinder for submittal.

I finished both tasks with 15 minutes to go, so I cleaned up my booth and headed back to the classroom for the review. We spent the next hour reviewing what we had learned in the past 16 weeks, then we jumped online to take the final. 30 minutes later I was done as were most of the other guys, so we went back to our seats until everyone was finished. By 11:45 everyone was done and we all sat around for the last 15 minutes talking to and thanking the instructor for his time and talents.

I really enjoyed the class and was glad I was able to fit it in this spring. I look forward to the advanced class in the fall and can’t wait to do my own setup in the planned shed in the backyard.

May 1, 2010

Mind The Gap

Last Saturday I missed welding class since I was in Minnesota for Jen’s Volleyball tournament. I had just started in TIG (GTAW or Gas Tungsten Arc Welding) and I was anxious to get back to it and finish my last two exercises. Two weeks ago I had finished the simple exercise of laying down plain stringer beads with no filler and I still needed to complete the stringer with filler and the dreaded butt joint.

I grabbed a booth as soon as I got to class and requested the necessary parts from the instructor to setup my machine. Once you start TIG our instructor gives you a Ziploc bag that must be turned in at the end of the day. The bag contains the tungsten rod, gas diffuser, cup and Colette that attach to the welding torch that we use.

I setup the torch, turned on my gas supply (Argon Gas), turned on the TIG Machine hit the foot pedal to test the gas settings and was just about ready to go. That is when the fun (sarcasm) started.

One of my class mates Bill, wanted to share the booth with me which I agreed to. We had both started the class in January as lab partners and had gotten along very well. We were both able to look at each others work and make constructive suggestions for improvement. So he brought his helmet, gloves, Ziploc etc into the booth and sat down to get started. Just then my instructor Ted came up and asked me to move to another booth thinking we could get more done if we did not have to split time on the machine. I reluctantly agreed and moved to the only other open TIG booth. Little did he know that move would waste so much more time than it would save.

The first issue was this booth had one of if not the oldest TIG machines in the lab. Every thing was manual on the box which is great if this is the welder you have in your shop and you need to weld on all different types of metals and most importantly, you have experience with this particular machine and know all the settings.

Ted said he would set it up for me and all I had to do was setup the torch and adjust the gas. I went down to the original booth, got my gear and proceeded to setup the torch. Right off the bat things did not look good. There are threads on the heat side of the torch where you screw in a nozzle that allows the shielding gas to surround the Tungsten rod protecting it from contamination by oxygen as you weld. Some of the threads were cracked off but not enough to impact the gas flow, or so I thought. I assembled the torch, set my Argon gas flow, turned on the welder and hit the pedal (starts the flow of gas and controls the amperage of electrical current) and all looked good. I put on my gloves, placed my 2” x 4” steel plate on the welding surface, put on my helmet and got into position to start a bead on the steel surface. I hit the pedal and….nothing. I backed ff the pedal and tried again. Still nothing. I tried again and this time I waited almost 10 seconds and finally the arc started, but the arc was not small and precise, it was all over the place and very sloppy.

The TIG arc should be very fine and precise if you have all your equipment tuned in correctly so I knew something was wrong with the machine. After all, it could not be me right?

I turned everything off, disassembled the torch and asked Ted to come take a look. I expressed my concern about the wear on the torch assembly and he agreed that this would impact gas flow and on closer inspection discovered there was a part part missing inside.

We spent the next 45 minutes removing the old torch and refitting a new one. I took an extended period of time because TIG torches are water cooled and when you remove the water hose from the welding machine there is water leakage so I had to clean the floor to a completely dry state so as to not risk electrical shock when I fired it up again. The 12 foot torch cables (water, positive electric and negative electric) are also housed in a rubberized/Velcro type sheath so we had to take that off the old torch and fit it on to the new one.

Pain in the butt right? Well the upside is I got hands on changing out a torch instead of just reading about it which non of the other students had a chance to do. I like to try and find positives in most any situation and this was a prime example.

So once again I repeated my checklist to fire up the machine and start welding. The arc was a little smaller but I still noticed that it was dancing all over the metal and it started to pulse on and off. The arc should be a nice steady and quite blue glow almost mesmerizing. Something was still wrong. I checked the settings on the machine and called Ted over. We both noticed the major issue almost immediately. The machine was set for AC instead of DC. What the heck? So the person who was previously in the booth was probably welding aluminum and had not set the machine back to DC as they are supposed to do when they are done for the day. I joked with Ted that this is the last time I trust him to setup the machine himself without me checking his work and he responded with a sly smile that he did it on purpose to see if I was paying attention.

We only have two hours in the lab next Saturday and then we take the final that same day to complete the class. I have three exercises still to complete and had hoped to knock out two labs today and have only one to do next week before the final.

But hope will only get you so far as all the equipment issues were making the 4 hour class disappear faster than I wanted. Even after all the repair and checking the machine was still not kicking in when I pressed the pedal so I decide not to mess around and I jumped back into my original booth with Bill. He agreed to let me share time with him and we at least had the advantage of two tungsten rods to share.

Tungsten rods can become contaminated pretty easy if you are not careful to keep them out of contact with your molten metal pool especially if you are using filler rods to add to you weld. If the rod becomes contaminated, you need to stop shut off the power, remove the rod, grind off the contaminate then use a special tungsten grinder to clean it even more and shape it to a fine tip. By having two rods, we could quickly switch out one rod and keep working while the other lab partner went to remove the contaminate. We could switch off as many times as we needed and save at least a little time.

As soon I fired up his machine sat down to do my first test bead all was right with the world. The torch immediately produced a small, quiet, beautiful blue pointed heat source. I moved effortlessly across the steel surface and produced smooth concentric circles across the length of the surface. I was back in the grove and fired up to complete at least one task today. I let Bill jump back on to work on his task while I went to clean a few pieces of metal for my butt joint lab.

I mentioned that tungsten rods can easily become contaminated so you must be careful to have a clean metal surface before you even start welding on it. In our class we use a sandblaster to prep the surface of our steel coupons (the 2”x”4 metal pieces) before we start welding on them. This extra step unfortunately adds quite a bit of time to our day as only one student at a time can use the small enclosure to clean parts and the machine has a pressure problem so what should take 2-3 minutes can take 7-10, per piece. Picture a scientist working with dangerous materials where the but their hands into two openings outside a glass windows. the openings feed into rubber gloves and give you access to a spray nozzle that shoots out the compressed stream of sand. One of you hands controls the nozzle gun and the other hand holds whatever you are blasting. Although the sand will scour the metal surface it just bounces off the heavy rubber gloves and leaves them unharmed.

I was able to finish the butt joint after just a few tries of getting the gap right. The gap is the distance between the two pieces of metal and it must be great enough to allow total penetration (the metal from the two pieces melts together and flows into the gap all the way through) but not so great as to cause the edges of both pieces to melt away and not bond.

The day could have gone better but in the end I learned more about overcoming problems with TIG than I had anticipated. Next Saturday, the final.