My first welding project: a reclining sofa brace
Posted: Tue Dec 24, 2019 7:21 pm
Of all things...
I decided to flip our 3 seat reclining sofa over to vacuum all the unbelievable garbage that is under there. The right reclining seat, my favorite spot, has been very...cranky lately. It felt like the mechanism was binding or so sloppy that stuff was hitting other stuff. It clunks and clanks and is hard to put back. So when I flipped it over to vacuum I took a look at the linkage.
I found a broken brace. Not expecting much I thought it would be a fun reason to try my new (used) welder. So I wire wheeled the edges to prepare. Next I needed to unpack my welding goodies. Gloves, slag hammer (unneeded for this job) and fancy mask. I had to take the thing nearly completely apart to see that it shipped with batteries. I tried it on the sun and it seemed to work.
Then I set up for welding. A comedy of issues revealed themselves one by one.
I started by wanting to fix the door on the welder. It was dropped at some point and Mike never figured out why the door wasn't closing. Well I did. I did a little metal tweaking but the biggest issue was the plastic hinges were swapped on the wrong sides!! So it put the hinge axle at the wrong location. Door works great now. First, my mask was not auto dimming, which I guess could have blinded me if I didn't immediately notice. Turns out the batteries are very low. Ugh. Before that failed it did pass the sun test though. This must have been about all the batteries had left.
https://youtu.be/oQ9j14Qt_EU
Here's a Daft Punk looking helmet man. But while I was attempting to weld, I also noticed that the wire was not feeding properly. It was jamming up. I had to take the end of the gun apart, but the wire seemed jammed in the motor mechanism. So I removed the gun from the machine which took some experimentation until I figured out how to do it. Eventually I was able to pull the wire back through the gun and sleeve.
Ran new wire into the gun...which was now feeding properly. Then I attempted to actually do my welding using the close my eyes method. I will say I did not expect brilliant results with flux core, never having welded, and not being able to look at my work when welding. I tried B current (A-D) and 1.5 wire speed but then I could tell that it wasn't penetrating. So I cranked it up to D and a wire speed of 3 and that actually sounded/felt much better.
Made some ugly welds, wire wheeled, ground and so on. If it holds, it does not matter what it looks like. I am not even going to paint it because it's inside. It will probably patina and then that's about it.
I reattached it. The best part is...the mechanism works almost like new. I am genuinely surprised it made that much of a difference considering it is a horizontal brace but it obviously stabilizes the linkage. Then I ordered some CR2450s from Amazon.
I think the funniest part of the story is how farmy this was. It's a farmer thing to have to fix your equipment before you can use it.
I decided to flip our 3 seat reclining sofa over to vacuum all the unbelievable garbage that is under there. The right reclining seat, my favorite spot, has been very...cranky lately. It felt like the mechanism was binding or so sloppy that stuff was hitting other stuff. It clunks and clanks and is hard to put back. So when I flipped it over to vacuum I took a look at the linkage.
I found a broken brace. Not expecting much I thought it would be a fun reason to try my new (used) welder. So I wire wheeled the edges to prepare. Next I needed to unpack my welding goodies. Gloves, slag hammer (unneeded for this job) and fancy mask. I had to take the thing nearly completely apart to see that it shipped with batteries. I tried it on the sun and it seemed to work.
Then I set up for welding. A comedy of issues revealed themselves one by one.
I started by wanting to fix the door on the welder. It was dropped at some point and Mike never figured out why the door wasn't closing. Well I did. I did a little metal tweaking but the biggest issue was the plastic hinges were swapped on the wrong sides!! So it put the hinge axle at the wrong location. Door works great now. First, my mask was not auto dimming, which I guess could have blinded me if I didn't immediately notice. Turns out the batteries are very low. Ugh. Before that failed it did pass the sun test though. This must have been about all the batteries had left.
https://youtu.be/oQ9j14Qt_EU
Here's a Daft Punk looking helmet man. But while I was attempting to weld, I also noticed that the wire was not feeding properly. It was jamming up. I had to take the end of the gun apart, but the wire seemed jammed in the motor mechanism. So I removed the gun from the machine which took some experimentation until I figured out how to do it. Eventually I was able to pull the wire back through the gun and sleeve.
Ran new wire into the gun...which was now feeding properly. Then I attempted to actually do my welding using the close my eyes method. I will say I did not expect brilliant results with flux core, never having welded, and not being able to look at my work when welding. I tried B current (A-D) and 1.5 wire speed but then I could tell that it wasn't penetrating. So I cranked it up to D and a wire speed of 3 and that actually sounded/felt much better.
Made some ugly welds, wire wheeled, ground and so on. If it holds, it does not matter what it looks like. I am not even going to paint it because it's inside. It will probably patina and then that's about it.
I reattached it. The best part is...the mechanism works almost like new. I am genuinely surprised it made that much of a difference considering it is a horizontal brace but it obviously stabilizes the linkage. Then I ordered some CR2450s from Amazon.
I think the funniest part of the story is how farmy this was. It's a farmer thing to have to fix your equipment before you can use it.