Well, maybe a little bit... Just enough to get me in trouble. Sure is fun to play with though! Scrounged up a large-ish DC/AC welder with a high frequency arc stabilizer a couple of years ago that was "broken". Got the welder part fixed easily enough and it worked great as a stick welder. Then I discovered that it could be converted fairly easily to a scratch-start TIG welder. Got that all figured out and it worked okay. Little too hard for my students to use, but I'm still hoping to at least give them a chance to mess around with it. I have always wanted to be able to weld thin metal- especially aluminum. I don' think I'm a real great welder but I do okay for someone who has had no "formal" training. Did some research and figured out how to wire up the Hi-freq box (good grief, there are wires going EVERYWHERE in the welding booth), and it works! I don't have to scratch start it anymore, and switching over to AC I can theoretically now weld aluminum.
Still experimenting with it. Only aluminum I had available was some 20 gauge 5052, and the welder only goes down to about 30 amps. If I'm lucky, I can get about an inch of decent weld in before I dab the tungsten with the filler rod and bung it up. Just keep trying...
In other news, the jigs for the airplanes work great. About 5 minutes of set up, then let them dry overnight and they are done. No more waiting 3 days for different parts to dry!
New year is off to a good start. Spoke with my administrator today and it seems like I just might be able to finangle a 3D printer into my classroom this year. If not, I'm definitely budgeting my money for that next year.
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