Wednesday, March 16, 2022

cheaper welding gloves, some words on the air compressor mounting, and... can we talk about workbench design & use??

  Welding gloves: the heavy insulated suede ones suitable for heavy stick welding are kinda stiff and fatiguing when you're doing MIG or TIG which doesn't throw much, or as much, slag.  On the plus side, they are cheap - about $20 - $30.

 For those who do not need as much protection, there are nice, lighter-weight, calf-skin or goat-skin gloves with long gauntlets, commonly called "MIG gloves or "TIG gloves" available from welding suppliers for $50 - $75.

 The first time I saw these was when I took an introductory MIG welding class from my local welding supplies vendor (the intro class came free with the purchase of my welding machine) and the instructor was wearing them.  I promptly sought them out.

 It turns out there are IDENTICAL calf-skin and goat-skin "rose gauntlets" available from garden stores and suppliers for $25 - $35.  Perhaps they are not sewn with kevlar thread, but I've yet to care.

 Now then, some final words on how I mounted my air compressor, since I just yesterday finished doing so.  Industry standard calls for some rubber pads between the unit and the floor, but I went a little further, because I was - justifiably as it turned out - concerned about vibration being conducted into the concrete pad of the garage... and thence to my wife's office / treatment room.

 To that end, I added rubber washers between the bolts and the legs, and a second set of pads and rubber washers between the elevation stand and the floor as shown in the photos.

 

 This turns out to not be overkill at all.  While no vibration is detectable in the cement floor next to the compressor, I found out shortly after installing that resonance in the slab means there are places far away from it where vibration in the floor is quite noticeable.  If I hadn't been a Tesla nut back in the day, it might not have occurred to me to even check.

 That vibration - at the worst point in the garage I could find, which blessedly was not in or near my wife's office as it turned out - was measurably less (accelerometer app on the phone!) after installing the second set of rubber blivets between the riser and the compressor, vs. only having the set between the riser and the floor.

 Locking nuts were used so I could leave the rubber minimally compressed while preventing anything from moving.  The rubber means the compressor can be tilted off vertical by about five degrees, until you run into the steel bolts and washers and it won't move any further for love nor money; the anchor bolts in the floor are set firm.  I am entirely okay with this state of affairs.

 Frankly, the readily-available "industry standard" black rubber pads are much too firm for the weight of my air compressor - softer ones would do a better job of absorbing and dampening out low-frequency vibrations... but they are what's available for reasonable sums of money (about $4ea) and they are an improvement over nothing.

EDIT, much later: cable-type vibration/seismic mounts would not have been overkill for this project, but they weren't in the budget.  Soaking up large-amplitude, low-frequency vibrations is hard.

 And finally, I'm gonna yammer briefly about how my perception and use of workbenches has changed.

  This is the only real workbench I have ever owned.  I still use it to this day because it is an indestructible beast.  However, when I built it, I owned fewer hand tools, and it seemed reasonable to make the back of the bench out of pegboard, so I could hang and organize my hand tools all over it.

 Even after I acquired enough tools that I had to buy a small tool chest - well, it seemed large at the time - it made sense to me to keep the most-frequently-used tools on the bench pegboard where they'd be handy.

 Eventually I needed more storage, and the upgrade path for people with money would be to buy the  rolling cart and two-drawer riser which matched my machinist's chest.  But since those were very expensive, I used a slowly-distintegrating wooden chest of drawers - found free in some rental - for over twenty years.

 Finally that nasty old thing became more of a liability than an asset, so when I received a small inheritance of a few thousands bucks from my mom's old bank accounts, I bought a full-sized (well okay, it's fucking enormous) proper professional's tool box to solve my growing organization and storage problem once and for all.

 And then I moved all my tools off the pegboard and into the tool chest because I wanted all my tools in one place to the extent practical.

 The moment I stared at the empty pegboard and wondered what I ought to do with all that new space, I immediately realized that I wish it to be a magnetic white-board with a hard enamel surface where I could put up drawings and notes, and that this would be TREMENDOUSLY useful, in fact, it would have been more useful than having the tools there all along, but hindsight is a real thing.

 So that's the new plan, when I get around to it, and can find the white-board material already made.  Not a high priority tho.

 One thing I do want to store at the bench - specifically, on the riser shelf above the bench surface - is fasteners.  I'm fairly certain I want to remove the fastener storage currently on the pegboard.  And I'm fairly certain I'm sick of walking back and forth from my shop to the storage drawers in the garage where most of my fasteners are currently stashed for lack of space in the shop.

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