Dan's Chariot #2- Materials Testing and Welding Practice.

Did some "testing" today on the square tubing I plan on using for Dan's Chariot. Met with Dan's parents last week and they gave me the go-ahead and also got me some money so I ordered parts!  The tubing I have is 1" square, fairly thin walled pipe.  I knew it was strong, but when I dug it out of the pile it was a lot thinner than I remembered.  Even though it seemed pretty stout, I decided a few tests were in order.  Turns out I can stand on a 4' span of the square tubing and jump up and down with no bending. There is a little bit of flex but it's very minimal.  The axle part is only going to be 3' wide, so it should be more than strong enough to support all of Dan's weight and withstand the occasional pothole.  The tongue will be quite a bit longer, but I'm planning on balancing Dan over the axle as much as possible so their shouldn't be much tongue wieght.

I also zapped a couple of quick, yucky, crappy welds. Then I proceeded to bash them to pieces with a hammer. Great fun after a day chasing students.

First attempt.  Still playing with the welder trying to get the best settings.  Just using my 110v Wire Feed welder (flux core wire) for now, but may do a couple of tests with the TIG welder later...





Second attempt.  Liking my settings a lot more, but I still have to move pretty fast or it'll burn through.





Managed to finally get one weld to break which you can see in the first pic on the second attempt. It was just plain a bad weld- and it only went half way across. If I can get them to all look like the last pic, I'll be happy. The tubing I have is a lot thinner than I thought it was, but I feel confident it is more than strong enough for my purposes, and my bash tests seem to imply that the (crappy) welds are MUCH stronger than the base metal.

Got some tracking notices today, so the seat and wheel parts should be here early next week. Once I have the seat, I will start working on a mount for it and figure out exactly how the frame needs to be to attach it.  For now, here's the latest plan with relatively to-scale wheels and seat.



Current thought is to weld the axles to the frame cross bar, like this:



But I'm not sure I like that. Will probably do a few test and try and break one or two just to see how strong that is. I'm a little worried about welding a solid chunk of steel to a much thinner piece. Have a few other ideas, we'll just have to see what works!