Hey Mark, It' been over 1 year that Joe the Plumber has had your cam blanks. I think you need to get them out of he's hands. IMHO. Concerned, Pizzaman
I got a few minutes in the shop tonight. I cut the collector off and started the inner point. I'm using the material left over from making the collect, so it's the insude of the bend. I'll finish it up tomorrow. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
I checked the Granger catalogue for the Methanol and was surprised to see they didn't have it. I wonder if 198 Proof Ethanol would work? Than you could put it to good use if you didn't use it all welding. Maybe Fisher Scientific or if you know anyone in BioTech they could bring some home? Not sure how old your eyes are but they sell magnifying lenses to fit inside the welding helmets, Im using 1.5s. Its nice to be able to get the front of the shield close to my welds. Trying to wear reading glasses under the helmet is a pain. I have an adjustable auto darkening helmet but the lenses has a green tint and works great for aluminum but I like my old orange tinted shield for most steel applications since I cant really see the steel changing colors with the green tint. Maybe someone else can expand on this?
I got a quart from McMaster that arrived friday, but the dry gas I bought mid-week seems to be working just fine. I used to work at a biomaterials company and we didnt use methanol for anything its very poisonous and you are supposed to wear gloves to handle it because it soaks thru your skin into and into your blood where it causes blindness. Usually its ethyl or isopropyl alcohols that you find by the drum in bio or medical places Im pretty near sighted so seeing close is not a problem .although I notice recently taking my glasses off is now required to focus on anything less than 12 from my face, I didnt used to have to do that. Now that you mention it Ive been using the gold plated filters not the green ones for years. When I work in the fab shop (as a machinist) the welders all used the green filters because they were worried about the gold ones because a scratch means no filtering and they never seemed to have a problem making really really nice welds. The #8 I just bought is green but I havent tried it yet, Ill give it a try tonight.
I'm thinking header #1 is finished. I haven't decided whether to weld on the last bend or weld it to the 2 into 1 collector and make it a slip-on to the header....I'll start #2 then see what makes the most sense. Just holding them in my hand I'm thinking the new 18g V12 headers are going to weight about the same as the stock 16g V8 headers....I'll weight it all up to see for sure when I get it done. Cam guy didn't respond to the "dear Joe" letter I sent today.... Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Mark the more slip joints the better ( as per race cars ) being st/st it's going to expand . I'd rather have a few leaks than a cracked header !! Not sure your Lamda will like it though ! To build neat header is an art , there's no machine that does it it's pure fabrication . It's looking good well done !
My main thought on the slip joints was so I could actually get everything in and out somehow. Then I realized there is about no way my flex coupling is going to fit on the rear header so i need to be a little careful about the location of the slip connectors so I don't crack pipes when the engine torques. On the O2 sensors I figures a littgle rtv on the slip joints would do the trick......at least for long enough to get the low power tuning done and the high power stuff ready for the dyno.
I got no response for Cam guy after yesterdays lets pack them up email so I just shot cam guy another email asking if he was able to get the cams shipped to web yesterday or if they were going today. I would really prefer not to fly to CA to pick them up but tomorrow that may become the plan unless one of you guys lives near Covina CA and wants to go be mean to cam guy for me? The ecu project seems to be getting a little off track too while I've been playing headers....I need to figureout what's going on there and what I should be doing. I think the board design needs to be lock down in the next week or 2 so an order can placed.
Do you think those welds will hold up? It seems like on headers, the welds are usually huge. Those look so thin. I don't know anything about welding, so it isn't a criticism, just wondering. Is it a TIG v. MIG thing? Here's an example, top one is the thicker welds, bottom thin. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Good question. Normally if the weld is done correctly it isnt the weld that cracks, its the base material right next to the weld that cracks. A crack right around the weld usually means only the surface was welded making the actual weld pretty thin and also letting the unwelded part act as a stress riser. I tried to thru weld the pipes but its hard to get a good thru weld without raising a large bead inside the pipe .so my welds are a little spotty and I would guess only about 50% of the weld length is truly properly thru welded. Making the weld wider would really help, its taller that is require to know there is plenty of metal thickness at the weld zone, but big tall welds are ugly. That leaves me with my welds may crack, but as it turns out I know a welder who can fit them.
Yes, both TIG, but I agree with Dave that the top one looks like Ti not SS. I think thin wall SS would just blow right through if you tried to lay on a bead that hot and wide.
The key here is the materials ability transfer heat, a weld joint in Alu. is always wide (compared to the thickness of the wall). Aluminium has a very high ability to transfer heat. Ss has an extremely low ability transfer heat, thats why the heat stays within a smaller area. My guess is that Ti is some where between.
None of those welds are MIG that is for sure, would never be that neat. Only corner shops that do boring road car exhaust fixes use MIGs because they could not give a fnck what the welds look like. I though used my MIG to weld up my collector and it was reasonably neat, but not at mk_e's level. As the pipes were just steel, I used gas for all the other welds. I also used MIG for suspension links that I made and they were neat, but again not mk_e level neat. Never had a weld fail, even after stuffing the race car into the armco and having to make new suspension links after they were bent into spaghetti shapes I believe you can convert ARC welders into TIG's. I have an old ARC welder, would like to do that one day and see if I can TIG weld ... and maybe after lots of practice get close to mk_e's weld quality. Pete
No response again today from cam guy, but I guess the day doesn't end in CA for a couple more hours. I think I'm going to arrange for a fedex pickup tomorrow and drop cam guy a note to expect them and hope for the best.
The arc welder is basically just a huge transformer and a rectifier. The TIG is also a big transformer and the ones that can be used for both alum and steel have AC or DC capabilities. I have a friend that made a TIG welder out of an old stick arc machine and built his own foot control for it but no high frequency for starting the arc so he had to scratch start the arc and contaminated the electrode most of the time doing so. Better to just get a TIG welder and use it also for stick than the other way around. I think just about all the TIG welders will also do stick but not very good the other way around. I saw a Miller just came out with an inverter type TIG machine they just started selling geared for the home shop that is small, lightweight and reasonably priced. Here is the Diversion 165 that you can buy online for $1,200 right now. I think it is a new product and the price will drop after a while. http://www.millerwelds.com/products/tig/diversion_165/
I went to start header #2 tonight and realized now that 1 is done and the 2 need to meet I really have to go backwards and put the collector in so I know where the pipes need to go. That said I built the top 1/2 of the 2 into 1 collector tonight. The botton 1/2 will be a turn heading back under the trunk and the top will be the 3 into 1 collector for header #2. I'm thinking the slip joints for header #1 and #2 want to be about parallel and that means collector #2 may want to be a slip-on vs a weld on like collector #1 is. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login
Still no word from cam guy. I arrange a FedEx pick up for today and emailed and faxed the shipping label .well see what happens.
