Secret Underground Laboratory Recovery & Salvage

Welcome to the secret underground laboratory recovery and salvage where rude mechanicals do magic. Hello I'm Bronze Age director of the secret underground laboratory recovery and salvage and today in the lab we have a couple of welding projects plus a special guest. This is the MiloMatic 125 it's a MIG machine which is MIG metal inert gas arc welding. Arc welding is a simple process of creating an electrical spark so hot that it'll melt steel and when the steel cools off two pieces of steel become one. Now red hot molten steel acts kind of funny and it has to be protected from the air or else it'll oxidize and pop and splatter and just makes a pretty big mess. So in this case an inert gas is sprayed down through this nozzle and it covers up that puddle of red hot molten steel so that you can weld and make nice little pretty welding beads. Our first project is this three-legged garden bench. Now this is a classic case of mystery metal because the magnet doesn't stick to the back, doesn't stick to the seat, but it does stick to the legs. So there'some iron in here. These things are usually made of whatever various scrap metal is around the day they start making them so they're not greatly concerned with the alloy of the percentages or anything basically it could be anything that they can melt. So we won't know if we can weld it because we get it cleaned up and actually try to strike an arc on it and see what happens. I put some pinferty oil in these bolts and let it soak in. As it turns out they're not really tight at all. Come out. Really may trouble. So here's what we have to do. Let's put this back together again. Now I don't claim to be a welder, although I can't weld. I've been welding since I was quite young. I grew up around welders and that meant I heard all the crazy welding stories that anybody can hear. As a profession welders probably have more crazy stories than most. Now welding is the act of getting two pieces of steel hot enough to melt together and when you're done there's one piece of steel. One of the most important parts of that is getting it clean because you won't just steel in that part where it melts. Have any kind of rust, paint, whatever they might be it's going to make for a week well. This is a pretty stressful joint here. It's not the most critical joint in the world but somebody will be sitting on it and if it breaks they're going down. That's going to need a little bit more work but it's a start. When I was young I knew a man who has been a welder all his life. He had been in all field of pipeline welding. He spent World War II in a shipyard in Australia. Other than that he was a pipeline welder working out in the field working offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and he got to the point where he wanted to retire. The company made him an offer. He couldn't refuse to go out to the North Sea and be a welding inspector. He wouldn't have to weld. He just had to look at the weld and say yeah that's good or no. Do that over again. This is about 1975 and if my n Well he came home at the end of his six week vacation gave up a good bit of money for breaking the contract in the middle of it and that's why I said why did you do that? He says you don't understand. He says on a calm day the bottom deck of that rig was 120 feet out of the water and on a bad day the waves were 80 feet over the top. I swore to God if I ever got my feet on land again I was never going back out there again for nothing. Pretty clean? My big worry was that there would be some kind of unusual mix in the steel that would make it burn or pop but it looks Still have to do this side and then we'll be ready to put it back together. Last thing to do is put it all back together. And that's it. Never look at this part without the hood on. Yes. Never look without the hood. kin frying. Okay. This is the fire tray out of my smoker. And this is the fire grate. It's made with 3 16th inch steel rods. And when you're smoking, you might have the fire going on this thing for four or five, sometimes even eight hours. And it just hit the can't hold up. It's lightweight, it corrode through. I've had to replace several of these things. So, I'm going to make a better one out of concrete reinforcing rods, the Connelly and the Rebar. The plan is to make a simple grate using half inch Rebar. It can be taken out. It'll just lay in here loose. So, the first thing I have to do is cut ten pieces of Rebar, nine and three quarter inches long. Now, there are better and faster ways to cut Rebar. And if I had any of those available, I certainly would be using one of them. However, this little cobbled together chop saw will serve the purposes. It was made here in the lab. This is actually a piece of an old bed rail. This is the famous $14 Harbor Freight Drill Master grinder, which doesn't come with a trigger switch. So, I had to provide one. And we'll get to see just how long this Linux Metal Macs blade lasts. I've used it on a couple of things that were smaller, but cutting ten pieces and a half inch Rebar will be a good test to see just exactly what it can do. Now, just for fun, we're going to give one of Harbor Freight's finest cons 5 inch Cut-Off Wheel. Let me give it a chance. Well, folks, I think we definitely have a winner there. That was about a little short of 15 seconds. This is good for a thousand cuts, 30 times longer wheel life. Damn, take an awful long time. It'still not useless. I've got plenty of light waste up that's good to cut. After a lot off-camera grinding to get everything nice and clean, I'm going to start tacking this back together. That's close enough for government work. I'm going to have the bars laid out I'm going to use this block to engage the locator, start from each end and work towards the middle. I'm going to use this block to engage the locator, start from each end and work towards the middle. And FireGrate did good duty force. This is Bronze Age, the Secret Underground Laboratory. Please We'll have more videos coming out every week. Appreciate it so much.